(A quick note and proposal concerning) Twats

I was watching news coverage of the Leveson enquiry a couple of days ago and the latest in a seemingly endless list of developments concerned Murdoch Jr. and his insistence that an email – clearly sent to him and responded to by him informing him that phone-hacking was a real problem at the News of the World – escaped his close attention at the time he received it, hence his claim back in July that he had never received it. To reiterate, this is an email he responded to concerning phone hacking, primarily informing him that it was as bad as they feared. To add to this, James Murdoch then held a meeting with the sender, Colin Myer, the next day.

Now, I realise that is a lot of italics for any paragraph to contain[1], but sometimes facts need to have a certain emphasis in them for them to really get across. My point here is that the above development led to just one of many times this year that I’ve found myself involuntarily shouting  at my television set “Oh fuck offfff you lying TWAT!” and partially dribbling whatever may be in my mouth down  my chin. Many would have you believe it’s a cynical trait to denounce people until all the evidence aligns in a way that it proves – with barely a shred a doubt – that someone did something; until then, it’s merely your prejudices getting in the way of your better judgement. But that doesn’t seem right to me.

I had a similar reaction to some news coverage yesterday of the Stephen Lawrence murder inquiry. The newscasters played some secretly-recorded footage of conversations between the accused in which one member, David Norris said the following:

“…I would go down Catford and places like that, I am telling you now, with two sub-machine guns and I am telling you I would take one of them, skin the black cunt alive, mate, torture him, set him alight… I would blow their two arms and legs off and say, ‘Go on you can swim home now.’”

Both Norris and his co-cunt, Graham Dobson, plead their innocence in respect of the murder trial, but even if they are – and they might be – should that let them off the hook? The evidence appears damning in some aspects, but vague and sketchy in others. In this respect, it parallels with the phone-hacking scandal – as damning as everything seems, at the moment nothing seems to be damning enough to bring down any of the big boys. So Murdoch Sr. and Jr. can carry on conveniently ‘forgetting’ details, or being uncertain about bits of information, because nothing seems strong enough to indict them.[2] My argument is – now stick with me on this – that these people should be found guilty of something. I don’t care what it’s called, I don’t care how it’s legislated, but all of the people I have mentioned are – let’s be honest – twats. In different ways, for different reasons, in different flavours, but they are all – a posteriori – twats. So legislate against twats.

I’m quite serious. Think of all the people you have encountered in your life, on the TV, in the magazines on the Jeremy Kyle Show, on the motorway, behind the counter in your local Costa… all of those socially-retarded anti-humans that have made it their sole aim to be as indecently publicly unacceptable in as many ways as they possibly can without putting themselves out. I’m not talking about people who might appear twats in spite of their well-meaning or without even realising it – I’m talking about the ones who are fully aware of the wrong that they do and unashamedly parade their ambivalence towards it. I’m talking about the blatant, unashamed liars; the unrepentant racists; anyone who gets into a physical confrontation over football; men who shout ‘Oi – AXL!’ at anyone with long hair in a plaid shirt, and so on. For too long these twats have clogged up our streets and viewing-boxes, managed our banks and driven our buses and with the lack of any incriminating evidence to land them in jail they’ve carried on regardless of other people and their wishes; twatting their way – in any way and every way – through every day.

Well enough is enough. We’ve grown too complacent with this behavioural trait. Generations before us bemoan the diminishing standards in politeness, respect and general attitude; they may be right, but I think what we’re really seeing is a pervasion of twattiness into common, accepted behaviour. It needs to stop, now. Round up the twats – if you know a twat, and find yourself wishing they’d get incriminated of something and put in jail so they’d just fuck the fuck off, then petition your local MP or states member to get ‘Being a complete twat without any remorse and showing reluctance to behave otherwise’ recognised as an official misdemeanour, and rid the world of this evil once and for all.

---

[1] In my mind, they’re a vastly underused commodity these days, particularly for placing certain emphasis on words – if they were available on SMS, Facebook and the like I truly believe it’d help us all avoid so much confusion.

[2] Saying this, you would think that seeing as these bastards appear to be the only public personas that haven’t been hacked that they would be found to be guilty by process of elimination.

Christopher Hitchens: Why he matters (to me)

I haven’t written anything on here in a while, having had other activities to occupy my time and a general lack of inspiration to put finger to keypad, but yesterday I had a wave of energy and knocked out around 900 words sitting in a coffee shop in the North Laines of Brighton. The style was typical of the bile that usually finds its way onto here – over-the-top, slightly insane and perhaps only a third written entirely in earnest -and I was all ready to submit it, for all its now-apparent faults in structure when a barista politely informed me that it was 7 o’clock and the shop was closing. I put away my laptop and didn’t think of my inane rant for the rest of the night.

Then, this morning, I woke up with the piece on my mind with a view towards quickly giving it a read and posting it when I read the sad news that Christopher Hitchens had passed away at the age of 62, after a fairly long battle with oesophageal cancer. It was news that I had, in one sense, anticipated for some time but in another sense declined to face up to as a potent possibility. All of a sudden it didn’t matter so much that my piece was structurally flawed, but that it seemed unworthy of posting in the shadow of a great writers passing.

I am well aware that many who happen across this – mostly friends, that might give my writing a kind and generous overview – might not be aware of Christopher Hitchens, who he was, what he stood for or what he looked like, but it is not my place to even attempt at a summary of his life and work. Brief outlines of his career, anecdotes and quotes can all be found elsewhere, in varying degrees of quality. All I’m really capable of doing to pay tribute is to say what he, and the event of his passing, means to me.

**

I first became aware of Christopher just over two years ago through my slightly embarrassing fixation with Stephen Fry, when a random Google search of the man threw up news of a debate that had occurred, pitting him against Ann Widdecombe (of all people) and Archbishop John Onaiyekan, to discuss the motion ‘The Catholic church is a force for good in the world’; Stephen’s partner arguing against the motion was Christopher Hitchens.

My first impressions of Christopher – sat in a white suit with pale blue shirt, appearing slightly sweaty with swept back hair and a podgy face – was that he looked like an atypical toff or a foreign emissary (or rather, a caricature of one from a Hollywood film). As he spoke his first words in his distinctively middle-to-upper-class tone, my first impressions seemed gratified and indeed had he not sat on the same side as Mr Fry, and the final steps of my conversion to atheism freshly confirmed in the months preceding, there is a chance I may have skipped through the video to listen to Fry and Widdecombe. As it happens, I didn’t – I listened on and felt a strange sense of transformation that I can still feel to some extent now when I replay the footage; not just in my opinion of the man, which had been harshly formed in the space of a few seconds, but in my mindset concerning more or less everything in my world.

If that sounds a little dramatic or dubious, I confess that I too have those thoughts as I read over the last sentence; but I know of no other way to describe it. The way in which he delivered his argument; the multiplying layers of it that seemed to leave no holes for objections or counterpoints; the depth of his knowledge; the eruditeness of his entire contribution – all of it left me singularly more impressed, in that moment, of those few minutes, than I had been of anything that had preceded it for quite some time. Within days I had purchased his polemical book God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons Everything and my reverence for him grew page-by-page – and continued to grow after I put the book down, to the point until it reached my usual watermark of obsession and I started watching everything and reading everything about and by the man on the internet until I had exhausted all of the resources at hand.

I have returned to the book many times since, to check on facts and quotes I claim to remember from it, and I always find myself reading for longer than I’d anticipated. Christopher’s writing has that rare gift, shared by writers (from my own experience) such as George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, of making it incredibly easy for you to read on whilst managing to state exactly what they intend to with incredible clarity. Christopher was always unafraid to employ infrequently-used words, Latin or French phrases and quote writers and thinkers that the reader may not have been au fait with; but it was never at the expense of the readability of his work. More to the point, it was always with the interest – it seemed to me – of initiating the uninitiated and of highlighting what he felt was important to become acquainted with as a learned reader. Certainly his work always had this effect on me – it is through reading his articles, his books and his collection of irreligious extracts The Portable Atheist that I became aware of philosophy through a number of its key thinkers; John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, David Hume and Benedict Spinoza to name only a few. By this token, it is most probably thanks to Christopher Hitchens that I am studying philosophy now.

But to be more exact, it’s almost definitely because of Christopher Hitchens that I am here at university at all. At the increasingly-ripe age of 26, I elected to study at Sussex not in order that I may get a reasonably-paid, secure job, but to escape one. After five years of pushing keys for the unworthy purpose of making the well-off increasingly better-off, I threw in the towel and said goodbye to the finance industry and a secure wage and hello to belated studentdom and barely any money at all. I did this, because I learnt – in a painfully, gradual way – that there was much intellectual, constructive work to be done in the world and that I wasn’t contributing in any positive sense at all. Indeed, by sacrificing my precious hours on my mindless, amoral and ultimately pointless job I was aiding a wider institution that I loathed. Rightly or wrongly, the first step I perceived to be headed in the right direction for me to have any sort of relevant impact on anyone or anything was to put myself through university. For all its shortcomings, university remains – it seems – almost prerequisite for anyone hoping to use their mind to have some sort of imprint on the world. Admittedly it could all prove to be futile, but for the moment I am happy; happy because I realised that strengthening my knowledge, widening my interests and pushing myself to comprehend as much as I possibly can, were what truly brought me contentment in life.

I digress, but what I really want to say in so many words is that Christopher Hitchens reinvigorated me at a time when I really needed it, and that – together with his seemingly endless body of work I have barely scratched the surface of – I am truly thankful to him for. His admirable strength of character; his unparalleled, library of a mind; his skill as a debater, writer and raconteur; his ability to inspire, provoke and anger at his own choosing – for all these reasons and more that I struggle to find the words for, he will be desperately missed.

Enough beating around the bush – anyone who habitually reads the tabloids is a fucking moron.

- A well-balanced, carefully thought-through critique of this awful newspaper naughtiness, and who should really be held to account.

 

In between the people campaigning for the hanging of Murdoch, Brooks et al and the people defending their honour*, lie the indifferent masses. Some are more so than others; barely in the knowledge of the week’s developments with their Sky boxes stuck somewhere between Dave and MTV, their laptop screen’s perpetually hovering over strangers’ Facebook photo albums, they have little time to be concerning themselves with such affairs. Others have a fair grasp of what has happened through conversation and snippets of headlines heard on the evening news, but remain unmoved by it all. This is fine, perhaps even better than being troubled by it at all (I certainly wish I could stop the voices in my head).

Then there are those that bemoan the demise of what was a 168-year old newspaper at the head of its field or even mourn the death of a ‘British institution’. Talk of Sundays ‘never being the same’ is rife across comments sections and Twitter and were it not for the equal if not superior measure of vitriol still pouring from every media outlet against the paper then it would be easy to imagine being temporarily swept up in it. Something that has been there all of your life can be hard to let go; the swift, band-aid-like removal of the News of the World from Sunday household routines has obviously left some people wondering ‘what now?’ as they tearfully contemplate a potential future of buying the Sunday Mirror, or perhaps even worse, the People (what is that paper?). The editors of the News of the World milked this anticipated emotion with every page of their final issue last Sunday – cramming enough heave-inducing, retrospective sentimentality to outdo their Diana Spencer and Jade Goody memorial specials combined.

But its age and place in the collective British psyche aside, what has anyone really got to be sad about? In light of the revelations that are unfolding at an alarming rate, incremental in both their absurdity and unpleasantness, there seems to me very little to redeem a newspaper – which in the same manner of its red-topped contemporaries – was irredeemable decades ago. However much has been made in the past week, by its defenders, of the papers history of award-winning investigation and busting no-gooders. Former News of the World ‘hack’ Paul McMullan, who has become the news debate cunt du jour as of late and has wheeled himself out (apparently of his own free will, though I suppose we don’t know) to dig himself some funny shaped holes to scramble vainly out of in front of camera. Appearing on BBC2 on Friday on what was possibly the best episode of Newsnight in recent memory (and sans Paxo!) McMullan deployed the gambit of suggesting that every issue that was filled to the brim with inarguable pig shit was purposefully put together in order to draw huge audiences for when the really big, important stories broke and they ‘got the bad guys’ (I’m paraphrasing, but it was certainly words to that effect). His direct opponent, the coke-aficionado and erstwhile genius Steve Coogan, did all but put his foppish head through McMullan’s chest**. But as well as entertainingly flipping his lid more than once at a defeated, childish McMullan (who was at one point amusingly described by presenter Emily Maitlis as looking like ‘a damaged soul’, a comment which McMullan did not even attempt to dismiss), Coogan hit a few nails squarely on the head when he described the paper as “misogynistic, xenophobic, single-parent-hating, [and] asylum-seeker-hating” and the closure of the News of the World as “a wonderful day for the press: a small victory for decency and humanity”.

Everyone is shocked by at least some of the allegations that have been made, but there is surely only a minority that find any of them incredulous. We have long known the tabloids to have a disdain for personal privacy – particularly that of a someone with the nerve to become successful in their chosen profession; we have known for even longer, that they’re prone to publishing nothing stories, which as inconsequential and tedious as they may be, are often composed entirely of fibs. The fact that so many knew that the News of the World was inherently awful, evil and full of garbage but indulged in it regardless tells you something of the great, supposedly intelligent British public. One wonders if it was a craven desire for titillation, habit or a hereditary suspicion of the larger, wordier newspapers that drove so many imaginably-decent people towards it. Whatever it was will be unlikely to disappear in the wake of its demise.

But as severe as it sounds, I fully believe every single one of the News of the World’s readers are culpable for the events that have taken place. It is their apparently unquenchable thirst for every available detail of a ‘story’ or sordid insight into a celebrity’s personal life that has pushed tabloid ‘journalism’ to the nth degree. To play devil’s advocate for one very brief moment, it is perhaps understandable to an extent that a newspaper, in the face of the unlimited power of the internet, would stoop to underhand methods to remain relevant and necessary. Understandable maybe, but not forgivable.

So, nor should we forgive the droves of idiots that have bought the News of the World and its sister paper the Sun week in, week out – effectively paying a pack of opportunistic arsewipes to either steal or fabricate stories designed to do nothing else but titillate. They may as well have been paying for a young, weeping girl to shit on their chests – a girl provided ‘exclusively’ by News of the World by way of forcibly taking her from her family home, her parents oblivious to the unlawful act.± More seriously, these gleeful tits were voluntarily ignorant to the absurd, often hurtful invasions of privacy that were rampant long before it was revealed that phone-hacking was a method deployed, yet it takes the recent revelations for them to think ‘oh wait, perhaps this is a bit much’. This is not a leftist argument for the persecution of the right-wing press, nor is it an elitist insult specifically to the working-class people who make up the majority of the paper’s readership; it is a justified complaint against all of the people that empowered News of the World. Everyone who turned a blind eye to the morally bankrupt, insulting garbage that they helped to fund while chortling over yet-another celebrity cocaine-bust¥.

So I’m done with Brooks, Coulson et al – the people I really want to see – at long last – held to account is the ‘great’ British public. Our entire nation of voyeuristic, nosey, ignorant hypocrites – each and every one charged with aiding and abetting; or failing that lined up and shot – whichever is easiest.

* Those same people soon to be vainly searching for any evidence of it.

** Another highlight was when Will Self – who, after managing to fit the comment ‘this whole imbroglio is epiphenomenal’ into proceedings – sincerely applauded the then absent Paul McMullan on ‘marvelously fulfilling the rat-like feral persona of the gutter press’.

± It’s exactly like that.

¥ By the way, in what way were any of these stories ‘revelations’? ‘Celebrity does coke’ – what? Really?!

Born – School – Job – Death (written June 2009)

With every step towards the back door to my office block, I felt the colour drain from me. Initially changes in shade, but eventually whole colours were vanishing from my soul as if I were a badly painted watercolour left out in the rain. This had happened gradually, over days, weeks and months; but it was only after three years, eight months, twenty-two days of working for Bridges Offshore Trust Company that I felt that my lines had been rubbed away too.

Nothing had changed – there had been far harder, tumultuous times at Bridges before this day. I had seen colleagues come and go, bonuses announced and denounced and even a merger with an age-old rival emerge and pass with little upheaval. Bridges was by no means at the epoch of it’s existence but nor was it at a low, which, given the current economic climate was good going. But this bared little relevance to me.

I turned the corner from Gourmandise coffee shop and weaved between the suits, shoes and short-back –and-sides on to the straight towards Bridges staff entrance. I felt something inside me swell with a familiar feeling of hatred as I glimpsed each face. Each face near identical to the next, with only eye-colour and acne to separate them from my judgemental thought. The rational pacifist in me mumbled quietly that these people were just as human as me, and perhaps only flawed in my eyes – but that pathetic chump was always stomped on repeatedly by the cynical, hateful bastard in me until he coughed up blood. I wanted to hate these people – I silently asserted my right to hate these drones every time I passed one of them. I spend 80% of my time justifying and rationalising every inclination of ire that passes through my head and often agree to disagree with myself and abandon the anger before it came to physical fruition. However, for the other 20% I let my revulsion rule, and revel in its riotous resonance with my instinct. Fuck them – and motherfuck my rationality with the embodiment of my empathy.

“Sweendog!” a familiar voice yelled

I turned my head to the adjacent pavement and recognised Philip, with one jacketed arm raised upward saluting me. He crossed over.

“Baaaaaack to the grindstone!” he sung in some made-up melody

“Mmm-hmmm!” I hummed in accompaniment

I dashed and damned my reaction as soon as it slipped out.

“Mondayyyyyyy morning…” he continued, this time to the tune of ‘Sunday Morning’ by the Velvet Underground.

I resisted my gut response to correct him, suspecting that he knew exactly what he had done and that he probably felt quite clever for doing it.

“Weekend’s just not long enough eh?” I quipped. God I fucking hate myself.

The remainder of the exchange fell into a blur of generic patter, which flowed less like a conversation and more like two film geeks congratulating each other on their recollection of a shit script.

Philip (and that’s Philip, most certainly not Phil) was by no means a bad person – or at least not one of the worst. He was a brown-haired, bland, boring man in his late twenties that reminded me of Timothy Dalton for some reason or another. He had worked at Bridges for eight years since leaving school and only moved up one pay-grade in that time. He had a filofax-full of qualifications that no one cared about and had on a number of occasions attempted to get a job elsewhere, to no avail. On one occasion, Philip got a job at a rival firm and handed in one months notice to his manager with a proud, happy smile on his face. Only to have it wiped off one week later when his leg was broken in a car accident, and he found out his new managers were not prepared to bankroll his first two months of employment harnessed up in a hospital bed. Some cringe worthy sucking up and lying later and Philip was back at square one with a tail between his legs and a life-long limp.

Poor Philip; he was boring, sure, but every now and then he showed the sparks of someone who may be bearable to be around for more than ten minutes without taking a blunt object to their cranium. This morning in question however, was not such a moment and I felt every muscle in my body pulling away from him as he spieled line after line of predictable dialogue. He told me of his amazing weekend, how great Saturday night was and how he was counting down the hours until the next one. I wanted to tell him that in turn, I was now counting down the seconds until the end of this conversation, or death; whichever was mercifully closer.

But I didn’t; I smiled, nodded and laughed politely at all the right moments and made him feel like he was genuinely entertaining me with his tedious tale. We approached the door to Bridges, where thankfully a name-less co-worker diverted his attention long enough for me to swipe my card and disappear up the stairs.

I jogged up the first flight, eager to escape Philip; but once I did the gravitas of yet another eight hour day hit me in the face and slowed my steps down to a momentary pause. It was here that I felt my aforementioned lines rubbed out. The very essence of my being suddenly left me, and for the first time I felt hopeless to my situation. Cold and pale I slowly lifted my right foot to recommence the ascent to my office. With every step a memory came flooding back;

Step.

I’m four years old at Nursery – a pretty, blonde teacher is heaping praise on a painting I’ve done, telling me that I’m going to be a great artist.

Step.

I’m eleven years old in my final year assembly, playing myself in a play I’d written for a number of us, declaring that I would become a famous cartoonist.

Step.

I’m thirteen, watching WWF wrestling intently, dreaming of becoming a world champion someday.

Step.

I’m fifteen. I’m jotting down sketches with a school friend, laughing hysterically, acting out the characters scenes as I note them down.

Step.

I’m seventeen, skiving college, writing songs in a park with a friend and a guitar discussing our artistic future as a band.

Step.

I’m twenty-one I’m ranting on about the absurdities of everyday life, my friends around me clutching their sides with laughter. A bodiless voice tells me I should do stand-up or something.

Step.

I’m at the door to my office. I peer through the glass panel at the crowds already furiously working at 9.05 am.

Step.

I open the door and step inside. The warm, dry stagnant air fills my lungs as I sigh deeply.

Step.

My life is over, I am dead.

Unfinished Leaks: ‘Do the Hippie-Hippie Fake’

If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem. In choosing to blatantly avoid the problem and as a result entirely missing any involvement in the solution, modern-day hippies are embarrassingly detached from the reality of the world in which we live.

I say the above not as a person who would wish for these beings to knuckle down and make an honest living; far from it. Working is not an ends but a means and there is little to be said, in my opinion, for the so-called virtues of good honest labour. In any case, labour in the modern, cubicle-encased sense is neither good nor honest, by any quantifiable test.

I say the above, as a person who empathises with the global situation and the plight of its inhabitants. Be they impoverished, in mortal danger, highly depressed or in any form of emotional or financial woe that renders their life impossible to manage with a heartfelt smile – I can’t help but feel moved, and while my actions rarely translate verbatim from my thoughts, I try to help or I resolve to help whenever an opportunity presents itself. To stop me from caring and my arms from occasionally reaching out to help, you would have to physically remove me from civilization and place me somewhere that media and press struggle to reach; somewhere remote. Then I could be ignorant. Then I could turn off the little dial in my head marked ‘conscience’ and get on with some sunbathing.

For this is exactly what the modern-day hippie does. It’s easy for anyone to preach happiness, peace, love and compassion from the comfort of a hammock in the middle of Antigua; it’s very different when you’re working a 50 hour week to keep a job you need to meet the mortgage payments and provide for your family. It’s not so easy to espouse the benefits of meditation and cleanse one’s aura when you’re perpetually in fear for your life under an oppressive regime or bullets are ricocheting off your house wall.  And it’s a little hard to find your chi when you’re in the first team of aid workers to arrive at the site of an earthquake and have little else more than still bodies and the occasional scream to greet you.

Modern hippies can talk of love and compassion without ever having to be called into a situation where it is needed. They can wish for worldwide peace without ever having to stop to consider how it (realistically) may be achieved. Their nuggets of wisdom typically revolve around (and I’m aware that this will sound like severe stereotyping) some variation of the notion that ‘if everyone loved and respected one another then the world would be at peace’; which sounds fine, but then so does ‘if every other person shared their house with the next then the worlds energy consumption would be halved overnight’. Neither are realisable nor practical.

Ignorance is ignorance; whatever clothes you’re wearing. Believing that the world’s ills would be solved if they followed your cue of quasi-love for every living thing around you doesn’t alter the facts of any global situation. If everyone in the world just stayed in and watched HBO boxsets then we would probably be better off in some respects – but a lot of people would still be starving, or dying from disease. Tragedies would still happen; it’d just be to the strains of the Soprano’s closing credits.

Some things about nothing

I always pick the worst times to write. I always seem to delay the thing I profess to love above all other things until an hour beyond when I had originally intended to go to sleep; or on a toilet; or at work in the midst of a cluttered mountain of in-tray, angling my computer away from the gaze of the managing director.

It’s 00:58. Around 20 minutes ago I stepped quietly down the stairs to the drink cabinet in the lounge and plucked my bottle of Glenfiddich 15 year reserve from its wooden hostel. A generous pour later I’m arched over my Samsung notebook with a vulgar assumption that the words will just tumble out of me. I put on some Tom Waits (I had originally intended on indulging in some jazz, but had 9^th & Hennepin on my mind and went from there. As I type these letters here I’m transcribing my thoughts between the lyrics of 16 shells from a 30.6) in the hope that it may help. It’s difficult to know if it has, but I am typing and I have only reality from which to derive my frame of reference.

I note that already I’m running low in my glass – and the whisky bottle lies inconveniently in another room at the foot of 14-odd steps so it is unlikely that I will prise myself from my bed now. I stare across at another glass of whisky – Dimple this time – which I had poured myself the other night at around 2 in the morning. I had been out drinking and naturally felt that it was a good idea to continue with a glass of malt, in spite of my tiredness and inability to stand, walk or talk. It appears as though I barely touched the rim with my lips. The wasted water of life lies pitifully on my desk collecting dust, scorning me with every glance.

Glenfiddich differs from Dimple I notice, in a number of ways – obviously its taste (Dimple being slightly sweet and gentler on the palette and throat) – but also in its ability to conjure imagery and invoke a sense of Caledonian longing in me. I think about the drink more when it’s Glenfiddich, or Highland Park, or The Glenlivet – I picture the water flowing down the rocks of the hillsides; I think of the numerous trips with my family to distillery’s around the ‘whisky trail’; I remember my reluctance to try the whisky, but my willingness to hang my head over one of the huge fermenting barrels, to experience the yeast pop in the back of my nose  near the rear of my skull; I think of my Uncle Walter Munro, and his divulging of whisky drinking secrets at my Dad’s funeral; I remember his wife, my Auntie Margaret, fretting on many occasions about him ‘drinking too much of it’ at social gatherings – my Uncle John Bennett blithely  topping up his glass with a mischievous smile on his red, bulbous face; I remember my Dad’s fondness for cheaper, blended whisky’s and his own history of bad behaviour on it.

It was not my intention to talk about whisky, but it is clear that my consumption has had – if nothing else – some animating influence over my hands. Never what I had in mind, ever, but at a time like this I remain content with the feeling of words being committed to screen, whatever they are. At this moment, I glance at the title bar of this document and realise I haven’t saved it.  A fleeting rebellious streak teases with the idea of closing down without saving – but it is little more than fleeting. It is likely I will keep this to fulfil some inconsequential, vain obligation of a blog page – or perhaps even as filler for some far off collection of my unpublished work (!).  This thought genuinely crosses my mind and I cringe only as I type it – without this reflection it is unlikely that I would ever note the gross self-reverence.

But to reiterate I am glad to commit something to screen, my last real piece being now six months old; not that this is finished, obviously, but the nature of this would allow me to break off the very moment I locate a pithy expression deep within the confines of my wretched, Microsoft-infested brain.

F12. There, saved.

I throw the earlier incarnation of this flow into the unorganised mess that is my documents folder – full of unending, un-ended works ranging from the vast written about the trivial, to the pathetic little written about the grand.

That’s pithy enough for 01:31 on a Monday. Sleep now.

Generic Rant for Gallery Magazine

Stuff: we all know about it, think about it and talk about it. So you’d think that something to do with this particular item of/event concerning stuff would go according to plan – that it’d be easy to acquire/use/interpret said stuff and fulfil ones initial expectations about it. However, as you can probably tell this article is going to offer a few hundred words that present quite the contrary.

But first, in this paragraph I present a scenario involving the stuff in an ideal world where the stuff would adhere to logical constraints imposed by my own opinions. I floridly articulate this utopia, going into an absurd amount of detail and exaggerating it to a degree where it becomes almost unrecognisable. However, with the loosest of grasps of irony I hammer my idyllic vision home as if it should all be true by its own virtue. Then, in an attempt to force a cliff-hanger where there really is none, I end the paragraph with a continuation in a bid to try and give the following (insultingly short) sentence some gravitas…

Stuff’s not.

BANG! I hit you with exactly what you were anticipating and fail in surprising anyone. But, expectations fulfilled you read on in glee – one by one ticking back your existing opinions about stuff, including some you didn’t actually have but feel are somewhat innate. ‘Why is it?’ I bleat ‘Why is it that stuff just isn’t something when it should be something?!’ You would assume it would be but in this paragraph quite the opposite appears – and yes! Yes you can imagine it can’t you? Especially as I offer a first-hand account that never happened, drawing upon emotions that weren’t really there and pass them all off as my own. It becomes quite clear that I’ve had an awful experience with stuff and at this juncture my point about the stuff could – and should – really be put to bed – but that wouldn’t fill the word quota.

So in an embarrassingly contrived effort to synthesise intellect, I draw upon a genuine historic tragedy (Hiroshima?) or a widely-revered-but-at-least faintly-obscure piece of literature I’ve never read (Waiting for Godot?) and make an ill-conceived comparison that doesn’t quite work (‘It’s EXACTLY like stuff!’). I ignore the jarring length of the last sentence together with the alienation of 99% of my readers and instead focus on patting myself on the back for the use of clever words and a cultural reference.

Quite how I got from stuff to this point would be beyond any rationally-minded person, but I’m all too aware that the conjunction of the mundane with the absurd generates mirth. So in an attempt to end on a strong note I turn silly dial to ridiculous and make one final, unjustified statement to take it just over the agreed word-count:

Stuff – Devil’s sperm ingested by the coke-addled whore of everyday life.

 

There you go.