My future finds me in the windows of Soho

A funny thing happened to me on the way home from work (and yes that’s how I’m starting this entry – bodes well doesn’t it?) around about an apartment building at the connecting bit between two parts of the giant escalator I was banging on about last month. Yes that’s right I’ve found it! And it’s made my commute back from work much easier, much cheaper and much more irritating. The sights and sounds of Soho and the surrounding area are entertaining on the way up the first couple of times you do it but they start to lose their novelty like most things do when you experience them every weekday. It should be noted that Hong Kong Soho is nothing like London Soho. Whereas in London Soho you’ll find mucky pictures in phone booths and unsavoury ladies of the night with less teeth than your average Ukrainian great-grandmother (ladies who are probably on their way to becoming Ukrainian great-grandmothers themselves), in Hong Kong Soho you’ll find faux English pubs selling faux Italian food while snotty ex-pats stare at you from their seats as you and the rest of the dishevelled just-got-out-of-work masses glide past their overpriced Chardonnay. I’m making out like it’s middle class hell, it’s actually quite nice. I did however wince at the discovery of a bar called ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ that whilst attempting a decorative St George cross on the front of their little English pub mock up have managed to come away with a Red Cross symbol next to the name. The result is a bar that looks like it could offer you a room temperature ale with your blood transfusion. That’s not a bad idea that…

The information on the plane flying into Hong Kong offered this little pearl of wisdom: ‘Don’t go dressed like a hobo if you want to go out in Soho!’ This is plainly bollocks. Not just because the first reaction it sparks is ‘Piss off I’ll dress how I like!’ not ‘Oo how charming and cute *titter titter*’ but because it doesn’t look as fancy as the plane thinks it does. It’s a place where ex-pats put on a shirt and go have a glass of wine, not put on a smoking jacket and have a cigar and a brandy whilst joining in a rousing game of kick the butler. So it all looks rather nice but the smug looking patrons do tend to rub one (read: me) the wrong way if you’re (read: seeing as I’m always) in a mood.

It’s not just that though, I’m not that anti-social yet (I’m waiting until senility kicks in during my later years before I become that easily enraged, and what a joyous time that will be!), it’s the pet hates about crowds that followed me from England as well. I remember commenting to a friend back home that I felt like I had really settled in at the point when the crowds weren’t walking fast enough for me. I had obviously tuned into the Hong Kong pace. This was a double-edged bastard of a blade as the sheer number of people living and working in Hong Kong has doubled the irritating effect of the slow-walker on my ridiculous lack of patience. You’d think all these people didn’t want to get home the way they clog up those escalators (Stand on the right so impatient people can walk past on the left!), stop abruptly in the middle of the path (What? Did it just sink in that you didn’t set the TV to record MORON TV live from the small village of Little MORON-ington!) or slow down to a crawl causing massive people-jams (What? Are you afraid you’ll leave your child behind!? Oh you are? Oh. Fair enough… Sorry.) I’m a miserable git I know, these things shouldn’t bother me as much as they do but there we have it. The crowds had me riled up tonight which brings us back round to the original point. Yes there was a point, stop looking at me like that.

I’ve elbowed past an escalator of people onto the aforementioned connecting bit outside an apartment building all on my own where two clipboard ninjas were poised ready to spring out with their surveys or some such nonsense. The younger of the two, perhaps being an inexperienced but eager rookie, steps forward to approach me. Just as she makes that step the older one of the two, perhaps a wise sensei figure, puts her arm out and pulls her back with a solemn shake of the head. She knew. She took one look at me and she knew to let me pass. They didn’t want none of this. I laughed a little to myself at how I’d scared off the clipboard ninjas. That is until I caught a glimpse of myself in a window as I turned the corner. What I saw was not myself. Staring out from that window was my mother’s face on my father’s body. This was no victory; the wise clipboard sensei had delivered a delayed and crushing defeat. She was probably explaining this to her padawan right at that moment when the horror sank in.

Now this is not the first time I have noticed this. I have been told all my life how like my father I am and my own mother was the first one to comment on the her-head-on-Dad’s-body phenomenon. Noticing the image myself was merely a routine gutpunch of the inevitable that I’m quite familiar with. What shocked me was not that I looked like my mother but that I looked like my mother executing the dreaded Hall Glare! Please feel free to insert your own thunder clap sound effects and dramatic organ music there. Perhaps a child screaming in the distance. The Hall Glare (Hall being my mother’s maiden name) is a technique most of the Halls from that side of the family are well versed in. It is a terrifying squint that suggests imminent bodily harm is about to befall you and it has been a staple of my own and my siblings’ childhood. If you were one of us then wherever you were if Mum was close by and you were maybe doing something you shouldn’t have been doing, there starts a definite physical burning sensation in the back of your head. You slowly turn around and immediately you eyes pick out the face in the crowd perhaps half a mile away… the Hall Glare! You swallow hard. A bead of sweat runs down your forehead. Mum slowly turns her head away whilst ensuring the longest amount of eye-contact possible. You have been warned. Silently but effectively. Sometimes she just did if she wanted our attention. This was cruel and unusual to be sure.

So imagine the agony, imagine the horror when I realised I was wearing the very same scowl that was used against me during my childhood. At some point we all become our parents, I’ve had a long time to accept that I will turn into my Dad because people have been telling me I already have done since I was about ten. Hell I’m sure the transformation is at least 75% complete at twenty two years and ten months but this? This was a shock to the system.

Or was it? Clearly it had just worked well for me. I had managed to avoid the advances of the clipboard ninja whose brethren I loathed so much on the streets of Kingston and the UK in general. And I didn’t even need to say a word or even look at them. The scowl was enough to put them straight, to protect me. I gained a new found respect for the Hall Glare. My mother clearly perfected it, it came naturally to her brother, her Father was apparently the grand master of it and now it has been passed on, knowingly or not, to me and also my brother (the Hall is strong in this one). It’s now time to make my peace with the glare and use it for myself; after all my mother clearly did a damn good job of raising us and passing on just one thing to me makes me think I won’t be a terrible father if or when the time comes. It’s always a great source of mirth to despair about how much I look and act like my Dad (making fun of Dad is practically the Hetherington equivalent of Family Game Night) but the secret truth is I’m proud of it. Dad looks and acts exactly like his father (Papa as we call him) and he in turn apparently inherited the same traits from his. Perhaps what I saw tonight isn’t so much a horrifying glimpse of the future but a sign that I might get the best of both worlds. There’s no shame in knowing where you come from, in seeing it every time you look in the mirror. Especially when you have so much respect for the people you see looking back at you.

The family friend who is currently so kindly providing me board and lodge out here commented how much I reminded her of Papa.

She honestly couldn’t have given me a greater compliment.

DH.

The Amazon RAGEforest.

It’s an analogy for modern life. It says a lot about where society has brought us; we all boiled every aspect of our lives down into zeros and ones and tapped it all furiously into flickering screens. Everything has got faster, everything has become accessible, readily available. Instead of going to the high street to do our shopping we went to the internet and then we demanded we do even less to get the things we wanted and started visiting online stores that offer everything all at the same time. It follows then that Amazon was born out of our inherent laziness as a species. We piled everything we could possibly want into one website so we had to move our fingers as little as possible. Then they made a one-click buy function! Now all Amazon has to do is eliminate the postal aspect of the service in favour of beaming your two pound book directly into your house and we will have achieved the slack bastard event horizon. It’s brilliant isn’t it? If it isn’t on Amazon it probably doesn’t exist and if it isn’t cheap enough for you they advertise affiliated stores where you can buy your items at truly disgusting prices. A Leonard Nimoy album for under a pound? Truly this is a golden age. By the way I didn’t actually look up a Nimoy album, heaven knows what that would do to my recommendations.

If you take a few steps back it’s easy to see the ridiculousness of Amazon but I think we can all agree it’s pretty great. Most times I remember to go have a look at it I find a book I didn’t know existed or a DVD I didn’t realise had come out yet. But then we get to the music section. If you search for a particular CD and you are a relatively normal, functioning human being, you’ll have no reason to lose your rag. The worst thing that could happen is that you might find a weird album with a name vaguely like what you searched for. Who knows, you may have found your new favourite band. Go through the music homepage equipped with a general disposition that can best be described as ‘joyless git’ however and you may just have an entirely different experience. I mean look at it! Go to the music section now but only if you consider like seven albums from the last five years worth listening to. Are you there? See! Trash! Maybe it’s just that it’s that time of the year again where I’m forced to say things like ‘that time of the year again’ (even early November is too early for me to think about it but retail considers the middle of June the start of the run up to Christmas) and the bottom rung ‘also rans’ of the musical eco-system slither out of their caves, licking their cracked lips and leaving their shite all over the place.

Obviously we have talent show perennial time-wasters filling in the spaces where actual albums could be. I’ll never understand the immense influence of novelty on the British but my heart goes out to all those crestfallen mothers feigning something like gratitude for the Susan Boyle paperweight her idea-less spawn have half-arsed their way to buying. The sad thing is that’s not the worst of it this year. 2009 has hardly been a great year for music what with Muse plopping out the biggest disappointment in the world and McCartney once again cashing in on that band he used to have, this time with a full frontal assault of ‘remastered’ editions of every album and a sodding video game, all the while cackling, rubbing money on himself and dying his hair with iodine.

As ever it’s the end of the year that houses the true musical horror of it all. Stereophonics are releasing another album in a desperate attempt to prove to themselves that they are still somehow relevant post 1999, Cheryl Cole sits nearly atop the bestsellers list in the middle of a supremely shallow vanity project only to be pipped to the post by Michael Bublé of all people. How many copies of his new CD does Michael Parkinson need? And speaking of boring people rehashing other people’s old shit, here comes that insufferable little prick Jamie Cullum back from relative obscurity where he should have bloody well stayed. What happened there? I thought he had faced execution for his crimes against music last time he curled out an album. He should have gone before the firing squad based solely on what he did to Radiohead’s High and Dry. And so we move on to the soulless cash-ins. At the sort of justifiable side we have the Foo Fighters Best of (if it was truly a collection of the best stuff of their entire careers I can only imagine it’s just a repackaging of The Colour and the Shape) but then we rocket off quickly into the dead-eyed money-grabbing deep end with a DVD and a CD of a Take That gig, sold separately of course. That sentence would have made us all piss ourselves laughing five years ago. This is what we get for not being vigilant! Right next to that I see what is perhaps the softest target for ridicule: a Snow Patrol best of. What? That’s just too easy to mock, it’s like shooting handicapped fish in a barrel. The audacity of these guys, they make one ridiculously famous song the BBC can use on every advert ever while every girl ever sets it as her ring tone, repeat the formula again and again for several nondescript so-boring-I-may-have-slipped-into-a-coma-listening-to-it albums and then you think… that… where was I going with this? Oh Jesus they’re so bland I can’t even keep up a good insult without getting bored. They do come across well in interviews though. Nice lads.

There is a reason why no album released around the festive season is ever considered an album of the year (incidentally those albums of the year would be Brand New – Dasiy; Jamie T – Kings and Queens and Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz unless Biffy Clyro pull something great out the hat next week) and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Christmas is the time for musical cash-ins as well as every over cash-in you care to think of but it always gets the blood boiling. I think it’s good that I keep getting disappointed though because at least it means I’m still optimistic. I’m quite willing to be proved wrong music industry but while you’re still pumping out collections of paint-by-numbers covers courtesy of Radio 1’s new favourite bunch of totally forgettable foetuses then I remain the same surly music snob I always have been. However I’m prepared to forgive you all the Jamie Cullums in the world in return for A Very Motorhead Christmas. Come on music industry, you owe us!

DH.

Triple Bill: Blood at Breakfast, UK extends boozelamatic relations to the US and Nick Griffin achieves the impossible!

Note: I have no real theme or structure to this week’s entry. In that way it’s the most ‘blog-like’ these things have ever been. Instead of the usual I thought I’d just write about all the cool/funny/irritating/exciting things that have been happening in a lame way to cover up for the fact that I don’t have any way of linking these things together. Enjoy!

A Water-wha?
Ah Hong Kong, where they have no idea what the concept of a ‘watershed’ is. One of the most fun things I’ve discovered since coming out here, they’re pretty much cool with showing you whatever, whenever and if you don’t like it well you don’t have to watch do you? It’s actually quite refreshing to be treated like an adult by television (an experience that previously I could only enjoy through Mad Men: the finest piece of programming to come out of America in years). This lack of a watershed manifests itself in a couple of ways. The first is that comedies on the film channels during the day time make frequent and sometimes quite alarming jokes about rape. There is usually some ha-ha-larious misunderstanding leading the female protagonist to assume that the male love interest was planning on raping her. I know, I know, I’ll just give you minute to gather yourself together, rape is pretty frigging funny right? There are also a lot of comedies about ghosts too. Ghosts and rape is entire package comedy-wise really. Even ghost-rape sometimes. The attitude seems to be ‘if you day-time-movie-watching pussies can’t handle ghost-rape then change the channel… ass!’ and fair enough really.
The other way the lack of any real concept of what should be allowed when is that you get some serious John Woo badassery in the mornings. It’s amazing! Last week I saw Chow Yun Fat get shot in the shoulder, back flip and land on his stomach whilst shooting his attacker at the same damn time! Over my jam on toast! Earlier on in the week we had a very dry, cop movie. I guess they were going for ‘gritty’ but came out with ‘maudlin’. All the cop clichés there, problematic home life, never there for his bratty kid who will eventually have his life endangered by the antagonist you know the drill. But let me set the scene for you: I’m finishing off breakfast as the film reaches its climax. Bratty kid has been predictably taken hostage by evil gun-toting bad guy (who also just forced a doctor to help deliver his baby at gunpoint, a plot point I found a little unusual, he’s a doctor he’ll do it anyway, you don’t need the gun…) Good Cop main character has his gun trained on bad guy as he presses the barrel against Bratty Kid’s temple. Then Good Cop dad just pulls the trigger and blows bad Guy’s brains all over junior. Good Cop and Mum pick up the screaming kid and rush him away. We immediately freeze-frame on this kid’s blood-soaked howling, screaming face and credits roll! Just like that, wham, bam, traumatised kid, that’s your lot. Did I mention it was also the kid’s birthday? It totally was.

Sometimes it’s good to know Americans.
Despite the frankly absurd notion I drilled into my own head in my childhood that I would hate any American I would meet in life I have actually found that quite the opposite is true. I have never met an American I didn’t like (apart from this one douchebag in a lecture back at university who was also putting his frigging hand up and asking insipid questions and wasting everyone’s time. Oh and he also kept poking me and going ‘buddy, hey buddy’ which infuriated me to the point of daydreams centred around his pain and suffering. Come to think of it he may have been Canadian… Hm… what was I talking about again?) Our neighbours in the US are, in my experience, some of the friendliest, most talkative, most easy-going people I have had the pleasure to meet. They’ve got this whole weird culture that fetishises money and cars and guns and that but it’s no weirder than our obsessions with brain-donor celebrities, queuing and complaining. We may all well be nothing more than super-evolved apes clinging to a ball of mud that is in turn drifting pointlessly through the eternal vastness of space but the American apes just seem to have a better time doing it. And that’s why I jumped at the chance to go get shitfaced with a Californian I barely knew in a place I’d never been to before in my life. This is the same Californian I met on my first day here. I was in Central when he asked how to find a particular bar. Obviously having no idea but assuming such knowledge would be very useful in the coming months we went looking for said bar together.
I ended up going out with him again on Sunday (the following Monday was a surprise Chinese public holiday – suck it England!) and we wound up in a Mexican themed bar in some place I can’t even begin to pronounce. Seriously I won’t insult the Chinese by trying. That old American talkative thing kicked in and we discovered the guy at the bar next to us was from Indianapolis. This revelation was obviously bigger than I thought because it warranted him buying us more beer as he settled his bill on the way out. What a guy. I wasn’t thanking either of them the following morning mind, not two more beers, two margaritas and a metro journey back to Central and probably a taxi ride too none of which I have any memory of. Hangovers generally tend to make one feel like a child again and it was definitely the case for me. I hid under my covers, wanted looking after, ate stuff that was bad for me and hated Americans all over again.

And now for something completely familiar…
It’s a good old-fashioned politics/pop culture diatribe! I was going to write this last week but due to the sheer amount of coverage and debate is sparked there was nothing new I could have added to proceedings. That’s why, now that the furore surrounding the whole Nick Griffin on Question Time thing has died down a bit, I wondered if I could, unlike many a member of the Great British Public, muster up the enthusiasm to express myself about something that isn’t happening right the hell now! First I have to say that Griffin is a poisonous little toad who deserves nothing less than a sound thrashing at regular intervals. He is a bigoted and narrow-minded coward who embodies the worst of us but what he isn’t is a raving lunatic stumbling around on the streets shouting abuse and muttering into his can of Special Brew. He is the leader of a political party. A political party that may be odious and offensive to many people’s tastes and sensibilities but nonetheless a legitimate British party that has (somehow) gained seats in dark corners of South Yorkshire. If you take my crap out of those last sentences you have ‘leader of legitimate political party’ and what about that tells you he shouldn’t be allowed on television?
As disgusting as the filth is that wriggles its way out of Griffin’s mouth is he is not the sect of society I was most ashamed of when I read the coverage on the BBC’s news site or watched the show itself on the internet. Who I was most ashamed of was the bleating idiots calling themselves ‘anti-fascist protestors’ banging on the gates outside the BBC studio, full of bile and hatred for the corporation because they were ‘rolling out the red carpet’ for Griffin and injuring policemen while they were at it. Excuse my German but you are all fucking morons. My father has a phrase for such pond scum: middle class anarchists. To paraphrase him, they are the protestors who roll up at the meeting place in their Chelsea tractors, put in some face time for a cause they should be seen to be supporting then escape just in time for the school run. Fuck them all and their trendy morals. It may be fashionable to bash the BBC (God knows there are plenty of reasons to) but this is one of those times where we have to applaud them, in fact no we shouldn’t even need to do that, the fact is the BBC were doing their job as an impartial broadcasting house. What good would Question Time possibly be if the makers decided they were going to decide which parties are allowed on and which ones aren’t? We must allow creatures like Griffin the stage on which to embarrass himself on. We did and he dutifully did.
As a good friend of mine pointed out however, it’s not as if Jack Straw left smelling of roses. When asked the very reasonable question ‘Do you think the rise in support for the BNP is due in part to Labour’s immigration failures?’ (not a direct quote but you get the gist) Straw made it seem like he couldn’t find his arse with both hands. He stammered his way through the politician’s handbook chapter on how to answer a question in such a boring and long-winded manner that everyone gives up on an answer and at the same time avoided saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at all costs. His copy of the book must be worn indeed. But that isn’t what last week’s <Question Time will be remembered for is it? No one will recall that point in years to come because the public evisceration of Griffin was far more important and far more entertaining, not to mention the reason why every single member of the audience was there (and speaking of which, the cameramen can’t have been too bothered about the debate because they kept hilarious lingering on the attractive girls in the crowd as they panned). I bet the MPs on the panel that week were thanking their makers that they got to go on the show the same week as Griffin, what a stroke of luck! Gordon Brown is probably doing everything he can to bring him back on for the next time he scheduled to appear. In fact Brown should just walk around with Griffin attached to his side at all times just to remind people that it could be so much worse (now close your eyes and let the image of the world’s most unfortunate conjoined twins settle into your mind. You’re welcome).
But without a doubt the very best thing to have come out of this is the debate it sparked in members of my own generation. We are so mocked for our apathy (I should know I do it all the time) but everyone had an opinion on that night. It’s one of the few times Facebook has made me feel something resembling joy. Just about everybody I knew on there was online and saying something about Question Time. We became, en masse, politicised and it was fantastic. If only it wasn’t just one night. If only it wasn’t due to such an extreme event… Ah bollocks to it, invite the fat twat back again for this week’s show, let’s have round two!

DH.

I am a stranger in a strange land. It’s great!

Ah Hong Kong, where the pedestrian crossings sound like Geiger counters. The sun has just set on my seventh day in the Special Administrative Region and although it’s felt like it’s taken a while I can just about call myself settled which is not to say I’ve got this place sussed. I love the views but I can’t work out how to get to most of the things I see from the living room window. I love the chaos of Central but I hate the bastard forty-five degree incline on the hill I have to walk up to get back to the apartment. Seriously, in this heat it feels like I’m training for a triathlon… that’s to be held in Hell. I arrive back from my sojourns into the surprisingly close collection of bars (found on my first day here by following the pictures of massive bottles of beer) sweating like a fat lass at a disco and the worst part is there is this crazy escalator that runs up the side of the hills to the houses beyond that people can get on and off of whenever they like but have I found it? Have I bollocks!

I don’t have a lot of time now for battling my shameful sense of direction and the humidity trying to find possibly make-believe escalators mind you because I’ve finally gone and got that ‘proper’ job I’ve been banging on about since the very first entry in this blog-that’s-not-a-blog. Well sort of. It’s an unpaid internship but it’s experience and that’s a start right? Why am I asking you? My bemused Westerner routine will have to wait until the weekend for now I sit at a desk and ring people and e-mail people and type things in spreadsheets and oh happy day I am now a normal human being! So now I work, I drink more water and I risk my neck every morning and night in taxis. I’ve never felt more alive! I would actually prefer to walk to work in the morning but that’s where my diabolical sense of direction attacks again. I’ve been taking taxis in the hope that I will learn the route after a few days and I then I won’t have to spend the money and it will be healthier. Only one problem with that: every day the taxi driver has taken a different route. Every day! I don’t know how they manage it, I’ve looked on a map Hong Kong isn’t that big I’m sure of it.

The first day’s route was scenic to say the least. It took about half an hour and cost about HK$20 which is not much. I was a touch late and actually round the corner from where I needed to be but hey, I was there, let’s get on with it. I queued up for the lift in the swanky looking entrance hall to the building I would be working in. The office I was aiming for was on the 27th floor. At home we don’t have 27 of anything apart from, I don’t know, millimetres of rain per day perhaps. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a lift that made me feel like I was shrinking as well as popping my ears three times. I restrain the thought that I was being made to feel like a country bumpkin and concentrated on staring awkwardly at my own reflection in the doors like everyone else was doing. Seriously how weird are mirrored lifts? We can all see each other at the same time and we’re all just staring at ourselves, at our ugly faces, the backs of our heads and our ill-fitting trousers, all looking in the same direction. It’s a wonder more people don’t go mad in lifts. Just saying.

I was shown around the small, pleasant office by the office manager and introduced to the girls I would be working with (and one man) who I promptly forgot the name of immediately after saying it out loud and shaking their hands (apart from the man, I mean he is the only other one). I sat down at my desk, which faces the door and logged into my own personal work e-mail account. I already had five e-mails offering me Viagra and ‘more girth’. Excellent! They do move quickly around here! There were also less interesting but more important e-mails telling me exactly what I had to do with my time here. One from the boss man who was in Singapore I think and one from a girl I could actually see from where I was sitting. That’s the weird thing about these messages you get. Important information is exchanged without two people actually saying a word to each other or their facial expressions changing in the slightest. Even if they’re writing ‘lol’. It’s almost like that acronym is completely superfluous or something.

The day seemed to zoom by in a blur of international phone calls to places in every country in the Far East it seemed. Conversations with receptionists and secretaries were both taxing and confusing. Yorkshire and Japanese to not an intelligent exchange make. Try sounding out letters to spell things because you’re too retarded to remember the phonetic alphabet, that was a fun half hour. The rest of the day was spent trying to pick up snippets of Cantonese from the girls in the office in between calls (fun fact: I failed). As I was leaving the junk mail folder caught its fifteenth of the day titled ‘men with big instruments don’t have to go down on girls’. It’s true. Double bass players are let off. It’s the vibration from the low notes.

The second day’s taxi managed to take a much more direct route, shaving two thirds of the travel time yet inexplicably adding ten more dollars. Hm. Well I wasn’t going to debate the finer points of a fair toll system with a man who could only barely understand what I was saying at the best of times, I had e-mails to read! E-mails like the baffling ‘fake Cartier watches for men with erectile problems’. That’s rather niche isn’t it? I thought. Those brave pioneering Asian entrepreneurs. And they say there’s a recession going on, pah! On this day the girls at the office decided it was up to them to de-Westernise me, which I welcome wholeheartedly. I sat among them on lunch desperately hoping for some Cantonese to sink in so I wouldn’t actually have to, you know, actively learn it but to no avail. Our English pronunciations are so dissimilar one lady wondered whether I shouldn’t be learning a bit more of that language before Cantonese. Grumble, grumble…

And the third day was alright too. So life, life is good and on the whole tax-free. I have begun to settle into what should be a productive internship followed by a leisurely break back home for Christmas and New Year. It’ll pad out my CV a bit more and actually give me real experience not just experience you bullshit you way around when you write the damn CV. I’m beginning to make new contacts, new friends… but not any money. But that’s okay that’s not the chief reason I’m out here. Right now I can say to myself that not only did I make the trip but I settled in and I enjoyed it. I hope I can say that six months, a year, forty years from now too. The very point of It’s Not As Bad As All That was the vent my frustrations and stop my brain from rotting while going through that terrible patch where nothing ever seems right to you. I can safely put my hand on my heart now and say that I am ten times happier than I was when I began writing only four months ago. All that sulking has been replaced by confusion and a little fear but it’s the right kind of confusion and fear narwotahmean?

So is this the end for the blog-that’s-not-a-blog? No not at all. I’m still going to get pissed off by something eventually. Besides it makes me feel like a writer. Losing its generally miserable tone can’t be too much of a bad thing can it?

Right, I’m off to book some sousaphone lessons. You know what they say about men with large instruments…

DH.

To the East, to the East.

In the words of Private Eye’s favourite poet ‘So farewell then England…’ I have finally made the pilgrimage from Northallerton to Hong Kong by means of a train, a couple of tubes, another train, an excruciatingly early bus, two planes, another train and a taxi. Certainly the longest journey I’ve ever made on my own I feel truly accomplished that I barely panicked at all. It’s true, only a couple of times was I reduced to a gibbering mess staring wild eyed around me while voices in my head belted out a crescendo of profanities. Of course I’m exaggerating but as the title of this blog-that-is-not-a-blog might suggest my predictions of imminent disaster never unravel in quite the earth-shattering manner I imagine they will. Below is a diary of confusion and uncertainty and as much as that sounds like the blurb to a terrible misery biography (you know the ones, white cover, black and white photo of a child looking down, gold handwritten title along the lines of ‘Mummy no!’ or ‘Not the stick again!’) or indeed a Robbie William autobiography I hope it doesn’t come across half as self important as that.

Saturday October 10th – 14.13 – Northallerton Train Station
Mum can’t look me in the eye for fear that she’ll lose it (not my eye, I mean she might start crying) as I say goodbye to the assorted family we have picked up on the way to the station. I have a rather unwieldy suitcase which I am still unsure how I managed to fill and a new laptop bag which is way heavier than I predicted with Spike Milligan’s war memoirs weighing it down a bit. I am flying from Heathrow because if you live in the North and would prefer to fly from there you are apparently a fool and deserving of the highest taxation when it comes to plane tickets. Us simple Northerners don’t have that kind of money! We’re all farmers and miners, we’ve got whippets to take care of! So the Smoke it is. I had decided to book myself a first class ticket to Kings Cross as it’s the last bit of leg room I would be seeing for a while. The ride is so comfortable and generally pleasant that I don’t really want to get off when we reach Kings Cross. That’s the first time that journey has seemed short let me tell you.

16.50 – Kings Cross Underground
Surprise monkey boy, the Victoria Line is down! Ha! What do you mean you didn’t know? Oh man you suck, you think you’re getting across the other side of the world when you can’t even handle London when a tube line goes down? We do it all the time! Sometimes just to mess with your heads. With that kind of travelling savvy you’ll be in Alaska this time next week, have fun with that. Say hello to the- what do they have in Alaska? – uh, say hello to the… tundra for me! Ha!

Well screw you spirit of London! With only a couple of minutes shuffling around and going ‘Errrrrrrrr’, a quick chat with a security guard and squashing in with hundreds of dead-eyed commuters I managed to get myself squeezed on to two other lines suitcase and all. Sure I parked the suitcase on a few people’s feet once or twice, sure I may have got blocked in the middle of a carriage where panic did descend upon me (‘oh my god, what if no one gets off at the stop I want? I won’t be able to move, I’ll have to stay on the Piccadilly Line forever!’) but nonetheless I arrived sweaty and harassed at Surbiton Station about 15 minutes after I said I would. Not too shabby.

Hang on weren’t you going to Heathrow?

Shut up you’re ruining it! Surbiton and Kingston means only one thing good friends and alcoholic. I meant two things, two. The last group of people I had to say goodbye to. Up yours Spirit of London, I win!

Dang.

Monday 12th October – 03.30 – A Travelodge in Kingston Upon Thames
The weekend’s festivities over, it was time to get moving proper. I had set an alarm for 4am so as to get out of the hotel and round the corner (literally around the corner, like a 2 minute walk) in time for a bus at 05.04 so I could be at Heathrow at 06.00 for a flight at 09.30. Airports are great fun. So I had to be up at 04.00 under my own rules. So what time did I get up? Yeah that’s right half past three as it says up there. Can’t be late now. I have a 2-minute walk round the corner to get a bus at 5? Well then I’d better leave the hotel at 04.30 then eh? In a pre-emptive manoeuvre the Spirit of London had attacked well before I set off as tfl.gov.uk had given me some non-existent times for a bus. Thankfully having lived in Kingston I knew which bus was going to Heathrow 24 hours so I waited for that one instead. A formidable foe, but I’m still winning. 5 in the morning trundling through deserted London, just me and the drunks. Well me, the drunks and some really super early work people. (Interesting side note, my word processor wants me to change those last sentences to ‘Just me. Well me.’ What the hell? Does my laptop want the internet to think I’m actually lonelier than I’m making out? I would imagine the internet knows that already.)

06.00 – 09.30 – Heathrow Airport
Nothing happened, it was really boring. I had a croissant. Oh and I saw Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hamilton in WH Smith and the lounge. Most probably getting to the private part of it as quickly as possible. No funny story there or anything.

09.30 – Flight 9W0119 London Heathrow to Mumbai
My plan to book an aisle seat so I could at least stretch one leg out when no one was passing by had been thwarted by a very nice lady already sitting in that seat who asked if I wouldn’t mind swapping. Damn my politeness! I end up sitting between her and a guy who apparently has a bladder the size of a walnut. Myself and nice lady seat stealer have to pause the thousands of movies we’ve been watching to pass the time every 20 minutes or thereabouts so Billy Bladder over there can go relieve himself. I say thousands it was more like… three. I watched The Graduate, Night at the Museum 2 and the new Star Trek film. The first would have been perfect for me with maybe more than just three Simon and Garfunkel songs (but then I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about movies that overuse the same music – Psycho irritated me for the same reason) and the latter would have been perfect if the whole thing hadn’t revolved around time dickery but whatever they were both excellent. These were undoubtedly the highlights as the rest of the flight was spent gazing around, looking to see if that one hot girl with the dark hair was walking past (why couldn’t I have been sat next to her?), trying to steal a look at what other passengers were watching (invariably one of the 12,665,442 Bollywood films) and wondering why the makers of the safety video felt it imperative that they give the woman tugging down on an oxygen mask such big eyes that were regarding the mask in a manner than suggested she was going to tear it down and make mad, passionate love to it. Or maybe seeing the seductive nature in an in-flight safety video says more about me than the makers of said video. A nice surprise occurred when the attendants gave out chocolate ice creams on sticks. A not so nice surprise occurred when mine melted off the stick and dropped on to my t-shirt and all over my lap. Incidentally if you feel like a challenge, try and clean that mess up on a plane between two other people without looking terribly embarrassed or as if you’re playing with yourself. By the time we arrived in Mumbai the local time was about 23.20, which worried me greatly as my connecting flight was at 00.35. I began to panic even more when passengers with connecting flights were asked to stay until last as everyone got off the plane. I got talking to a pleasant girl who was also going to Hong Kong. She seemed to be far more calm so I decided it would be advisable to stay with her for the time being for safety and in the hope that some of that serenity would rub off on me (not that kind of rub, get your heads out of the gutter). If I’d been to Mumbai airport before I would have known that such a state of calm is impossible there.

Tuesday 13th October – 00.00 Local Time – Mumbai Airport
Apart from the heat the first thing that hit me upon entering the airport was that security had some pretty serious looking weaponry strapped to their backs. Guides were taking the whole dishevelled lot of us directly to our connecting flight to Hong Kong thankfully so with my panic alleviated they thought to instil some fresh panic through guns, being angry, separating lines and scanning/ feeling me up several times. I was still holding my laptop bag and my jacket feigning nonchalance all the while desperately hoping they were successfully covering my chocolate stains. Sending my bag and coat through the x-ray scanner left me feeling exposed and looking like someone who likes chocolate just a little too much. The ladies lined down one side of security while the guys went down another. People gathered to wait for their partners behind the barrier on the other side of the pedestals every person was stood on to get the once over with that stick that goes ‘boop’. So they all get to watch as four at a time, we present what must look like the world’s worst rendition of the dance from Village People’s YMCA. As you may have guessed as I exposed the true horror of my scars from the chocolate incident, stood with my legs and arms apart, hot girl with the dark hair of course got a front row view.

00.35 Local Time – Flight 9W0076
After no less than three bag scans and four frisks I found myself herded onto the next plane, which may as well have been the exact same plane as before. It wasn’t, it was slightly different but for all we knew they could have just been playing a big practical joke on us or pretending their airport is way bigger than it actually is for some bizarre reason. I had foolishly miscalculated the length of time I’d be in the air. The first flight was just under 9 hours and this one clocked in at just below 6. Not the further 8 some hypothesised but also not the ‘3 or 4’ one passenger seemed to think. Woefully, because this was the same airline I had the same selection of films and TV shows to work with so already having watched everything I could be bothered with last time round I made do with Tom Hanks and That Thing You Do. It was rubbish. There was a sudden ‘lights out’ as soon as we were in the air so I took this to mean ‘GO TO SLEEP’ and I tried to do just that…

09.30 Local Time – Hong Kong
… and failed. I emerged from the plane into the harsh light of Hong Kong airport looking more disheveled and bewildered than before as is customary I presume. All passengers had to collect a form for entry into the country as well as a health declaration to be filled in before we could get out of the airport. Passengers obviously and understandably sick to death of flying and everything associated with it massed around the poor staff handing out these forms as if they were disaster victims and the staff were administering vital aid. I got lost in the scrum eventually escaping with the two necessary flimsy pieces of paper. No pen mind. I walked a while before finding a bank of chained up pens and filled in the papers. When asked to tick any health issues from a list that I might be experiencing I thought in the interest of honesty I would tick ‘runny nose’ and make a note that this was due to the dog-end of a cold and the air conditioning on the planes I’d been on. What I didn’t realise, and it’s my own fault really, was that by doing this what I had actually declared was ‘I HAVE SWINE FLU! YOU’RE WHOLE FAMILY IS AT RISK! GERMS EVERYWHERE!’ There was muffled mumblings and a ‘just step this way sir’. Here we go. I was marched away from the line and given one of those fashionable masks every one is wearing these days. I was lead down an escalator and round a corner into a little corridor of cubicles acting as a sort of doctor’s office. I was sat down and given a plastic card with ‘22’ on it. There was no one else around. A couple of seconds passed. A masked man in a suit walked briskly past and sat down on the other side of the cubicle wall to my left. About ten seconds passed. He poked his head around the wall and said ‘number 22?’ I felt like I was in some sort of administrative parody sketch but I went along with it any way. He checked the details I’d filled in on the paper and when it came to date of birth he quickly glanced up at a helpful chart with years on it and numbers corresponding to the years. No, it appeared I was not lying to a doctor about my age. I had a thermometer stuck in both ears and a masked nurse came by to tell me that I have a slightly higher temperature that I should. Of course I have, I thought, I’m English! Better yet I’m Northern, anywhere further than Scarborough and I’m going to start feeling a bit hot love! Though communication was stifled through both language and very physical barriers what with the mask and all, I managed to decipher that yes I was indeed perfectly fine, could remove the mask and call a doctor if I begin to feel worse. I was now allowed to enter Hong Kong!

And it was worth the wait.

The extremely fast train ride into the centre showed off some truly stunning scenery. I have already in one sleepless day got lost in the central shopping and bar area until it got dark to see the lights come on, had a drink with a new American friend and dined at a club I was not a member of. I haven’t managed to shake my COLD yet (COLD Hong Kong not FLU) but I hope next week I’ll be writing a lot more interesting things here. Including maybe about my first day of proper work…

But the chocolate stains never came out of that t-shirt.

DH.

A Manifesto

‘Change for real. Change for good’ is the lame slogan of the Liberal Democrats for their next election attempt. It’s rubbish on so many levels. For one, is ‘change for real’ even English? It doesn’t help that when written down it seems hard not to substitute it for ‘Change fo’ reals!’ as well. It’s easy to mock, and is ambiguous and vague enough to mean nothing but at the same time be wide open for any sort of interpretation one fancies. Basically it’s the perfect political slogan. It’s got me talking about it so I suppose it’s achieved something already, it has sparked debate. It’s missing a couple of crucial things though; namely honesty and fear. If I had to create a slogan for a political party it would be something along the lines of ‘Eh why not?’, ‘As if you could do any better’, ‘Someone’s got to do it’ or ‘How fond are you of your children… Vote for me.’ Something either bewildering honest in comparison to the oppositions ‘Change is nice’ crap or something with an unsettling sense of menace. Because the way I see it politics needs to be both completely transparent and terrifying to make anything work these days. Let’s make some wild and stupid changes with no ulterior motives other than we think it’ll work better and if anyone disagrees with us we threaten them with repercussions of violence, intimidation and endless televised Vanessa Feltz monologues (no cutaways, just Vanessa and a camera that slowly zooms further and further into her gaping mouth over the hour long speech. Think about that for a moment. Allow the true horror of the situation to sink in…)

But don’t get me wrong, these decisions we’ll make won’t be randomly selected policies created just to amuse ourselves. Although they may seem like that on the surface these directives will improve life as we know it. The terms New World Order and First Against the Wall are thrown around far too much these days (probably) but hear me out. The Intangible Menace Party’s ‘See-Through Alligator’ Manifesto (geddit? Transparent and terrifying… Yeah? Whatever…) will be baffling radical and radically baffling. Here are a few choice extracts.

On Parliament: Any speaker wishing to introduce some strange policy or debate existing ones must be willing to fight for it. Literally. If the debate gets too heated and is still going on after a certain pre-ordained amount of time, the head speaker can at will shout ‘FIGHT’ and at that point becomes the referee. The two speakers will wrap rope around their knuckles (because that looked cool as hell in Ong Bak) and will pummel each other over their beliefs. The fight goes on until one speaker cannot continue leaving the winner’s position on the policy or indeed his new policy as the one that will be acted upon. Don’t like the way things turned out? Challenge the winner! The best part? All televised live! That should sort out the problem of stagnant prime time television shows. No red-faced newspaper commentators will able to argue that the BBC television license is a waste of money with live House of Commons Deathmatches broadcast regularly. I know this system may seem needlessly violent and more than a little bloodthirsty but this way we’d only ever see policies enforced by people truly passionate about the cause. You won’t see a meek, slimy, scheming politician get his way through poisonous words and leaks to the press. If he doesn’t have the balls to step into the arena and fight for his party he gets nothing! If you’re still not sold on this just think about the possibilities for Prime Minister’s Question Time. I think you’re going to like this.

On Television: Having given the UK the greatest broadcast sensation to ever hit its shores where does the Intangible Menace Party go from there? Well first of all, no more reality TV. Just because. It’s a stale medium and needs to go. Off the back of that it also follows that ‘talent’ contests will have to go as well or they’ll have to at least undergo a serious retooling. No more celebrity judges, no sob stories or ‘oh mah gawd! She sings well but she’s ugly! How can this be!’ histrionics. Talent should be its own advert otherwise what’s the point. This should also help to stem the tide of oxygen thief hangers on, famous for doing literally nothing but walk and talk (and in some cases the latter is debatable). All new programming for all channels will be passed through a new governmental department of quality in broadcasting. There the various pitches will be scrutinised under strict criteria. Does it have a story? Does it have longevity without becoming boring or ridiculous? Will it be well-acted? Will it make the audience think? Does it have naked boobs involved? If the answer to all of these questions is a ‘yes’ then it gets the green light! The benefits of this process should be obvious and immediate.

On Football: One of the most radical of the party’s policies, all football players will have their pay reduced to that of your average shop assistant. Now we’ll see who really wants to play football and who just likes money. Frankly the sheer amount that top football players are paid is disgusting to the point of rage-powered projectile vomiting. This policy is designed to not only save the country, not to mention the world, billions of pounds but also it is an attempt to elevate the quality of the game and wipe out of existence the image of the super-privileged undeserving sportsman crashing his astonishingly expensive cars and generally flaunting his super-nova levels of smug bastardry in all our faces. All that will be left is the true sportsmen, the ones who really want to be there, who only ever wanted to play football without all the bullshit. They’ll still play for their clubs even on no more than £15,000 a year because they want to. The knock on effect will be that footballers will have to move back in with their parents to reduce the cost of living so they’ll all end up playing for their actual local clubs, leveling the playing field quite considerably. Football fans mourn not for the larger-than-life strikers of the top clubs (because they undoubtedly would all leave and show their true colours when they do) they were only holding us back. The focus will now be on the sport not the life behind the sport, honour will return to the stadiums now that only the faithful remain, there will never be a wider distribution of talent and we’ll be in power for like 2 months at best.

On the BNP: We at the Intangible Menace Party are all for free democratic elections, healthy competition, the right to free speech and all that good stuff but every time one of you fat, hate-filled pieces of filth opens your mouth we’ll quickly usher one wheelchair bound lesbian Muslim into the country. So shut the fuck up and go away already.

On Third World Debt: Abolish it. We’ll more than make up for it with the football thing.

On Pop Culture and Education: Pop culture is dying. It’s a horrible rotting carcass wherein we worship the truly deplorable and inherently pointless. Your magazines and papers and websites that are devoted to the act of celebrity watching and gossip will be destroyed and in their place will be things we deem to be more worthy. This will tie into education quite nicely as the ideal for young men and women to look up to will no longer be a stick think foetus pouting their way through the latest drug scandal on early morning Channel 4 shows (you know, for the kids!), it will be the intelligent and contemplative, politically aware grown-up. Basically Jeremy Paxman will be the new Jordan! You’ll think you miss the trash and gossip but eventually you’ll come to love the enforced readings and debates of the great political and philosophical works of our time until you’ve learnt the fractional amount you need to work out that we’re fascist bastards and need to be overthrown immediately. We’ll barely be in power but we’ll leave behind a twenty-first century enlightenment and that’ll comfort us when you line us up first against the wall for the firing squad.

DH.

The Five ‘People’ you Meet on the National Express.

This Thursday I am once again, and completely without the consent of my bank account, going back to London for a night. I had such great times in Kingston that I feel this is totally justified, the only person I’d have to explain myself to after all is my wallet in a feverish daydream that would undoubtedly be a psychotherapist’s wet dream (I imagine the wallet talking through Jim Henson style puppetry and it would be sort of – you know what it’s not important, moving on). The point is to get there I will have to partake in a ritual that I am far too familiar with: a combination of trains and tubes from North Yorkshire to London, the South West and Surrey. Due to my years at university in Kingston I could probably do this journey in my sleep and really I would absolutely love to do that because it would be decidedly less irritating and would put a lot less stress on my already fragile faith in humanity. You see anyone who has been on a train journey anywhere ever, but particularly the one that goes to and from King’s Cross to Edinburgh and beyond, has been beset on all sides by threats to sanity and decency so severe they’d make H.P. Lovecraft curl up into the foetal position and sob into his necronomicon. I’m talking of course of:

The Five ‘People’ you Meet on the National Express.

1) The Woefully Old – Likely the first type you will meet on the National Express first class service to Hell because they’ll be in your seat that you booked ages in advance… asleep. You could try to cough politely or say excuse me but they won’t hear you, and there’s always the creeping suspicion that they’re dead. It might be better if they were because then you won’t have to go through the super awkward ‘I think you’re in my seat’ exchange. This is all provided you can actually wake them and you can’t bring yourself to hit them on the shoulder until they wake up because everyone will be looking at you turfing an old lady out of a seat. This is an especially uncomfortable process if she isn’t too steady on her legs any more. You could be there for hours, with all those eyes on you, squinting at you and hating you. God you’re a shit.

2) The Professional Parent – In fairness these ones are everywhere not just on trains but their malevolent powers are heightened on railway lines. You know these creatures, they’re the one who have at least two babies strapped to their bodies as well as a bare minimum of two other kids, just old enough to have perfected their annoying whine technique, trotting along beside them. They will feel the need to shout the horribly pretentious names they have cursed their offspring with at the top of their lungs (Blake! Sapphie! Jocasta! Christobel! Eowyn! Alfie! ((there’s always an Alfie))) and will pull all manners of weird and wonderful shite out of their magic Mary Poppins bag of noisy, distracting tat to keep the ankle biters amused. Lord help you if they’ve managed to somehow get their spawn installed in a seat that’s actually separate from themselves because now you’ll have them parading up and down for the entire journey, smacking you in the mouth with their massive backpack as they get every little thing their darling offspring could possibly desire. They want you to be fascinated by them and can’t understand why you aren’t amazed that they’ve made a baby. Despite the fact that it’s something a dog can do.

3) The Really Cool Kids – This might be a product of age but the Really Cool Kids on the train are some of the worst offenders. They’ve occupied two tables and have spread themselves and all their gear out quite expertly. Some of them might be lying down across the seats the bohemian bastards. The Really Cool Kids look like every character from Nathan Barley but are completely unaware of this. In fact they are pretty much unaware of anything or anyone in the carriage outside of their loud conversations on the principal subject of how cool they are. They discuss loudly things that make The Woefully Old squirm and bring you close to physical violence if one of them busts out the obnoxiously loud, equally obnoxiously tinny sounding music-playing mobile phone. You hate them because you’re no longer like them. Your dentist hates them because they make you grind all the enamel off your teeth.

4) The Extremely Important Businessman/woman – An old cliché but one that rings true. This caricature has been portrayed by lazy comedians since the advent of the mobile phone so what can I say about the EIB that you don’t already know and hate? These Alan Sugar wannabes (surely a very low caste) are convinced that you need to know the inner workings of every little bullshit mundane aspect of their various meaningless meetings and so on. The only plus side is when the journey is over you will now know enough to take their jobs from them.

5) The Squaddie – The Squaddie is legitimately terrifying! What’s worse is he only moves in packs! When your train slows down at the platform of the next station you silently pray that the shaven headed meatbags with cans of lager bought from the platform café in one hand and unfeasibly large hold-alls in the other (who knows what’s in them! Guns? More booze? Guns that shoot booze?!) don’t pile into your carriage. Invariably they will. They are loud, obnoxious, at least halfway to drunk, liable to start a fight and incredibly fun. When they arrive you will turn your mp3 player up louder and glare intensely out the window like your life depended on it because for all you know it might! But if you buy yourself a drink and actually get talking to them, you might have the most fun you’ve ever had on a train. Warning: only attempt this if you are sure you can handle your alcohol, are most of the way through your journey and harbour at least some racist views. And that’s only if you’re lucky enough to encounter them during the ‘amiable’ drunk stage.

Yes the National Express route to the old Smoke can be daunting and lined with many different characters (read: arseholes)… which is why I’ll be travelling by Grand Central on Thursday! The only thing I have to deal with on Grand Central trains is an abundance of foot room! And chavs. And people from Sunderland. Oh and the occasional group of squaddies I suppose. I guess there’ll be a fair amount of the Woefully Old too but you know… shit.

DH.

The Politics Post

Warning: The following contains POLITICS. It’s not at all researched and is mainly fuelled by bile and confusion. Pinch of salt and all that…

No member of my generation can attest to be a deep thinker. Our brains have turned into mush from the poundings with give them through the incredibly fast and limitless stream of drivel that envelops our lives. Off-licenses are open twenty-four hours, terrible TV shows are always playing if you want them to be on several thousand different websites, you can have a meal cooked in your microwave in three minutes and you can tell everyone you know at any time, in any place exactly what you’re thinking. Do you know what else is immediately accessible any time you like? News. But we don’t care about that.

News is primarily infused with politics and politics by its very nature is a slow-moving vehicle. Our instant gratification lives have cultivated us in such a way that we cannot possibly care about something so slow and unwieldy. (Of course if you really want instant gratification influenced news you can always listen to Radio One’s Newsbeat, news so simplified and lowest common denominator it would make Newsround’s ten year old reporters hold their heads in their hands and turn to hard liquor.) This is such a terrible tragedy it genuinely makes me sad. That annoying advert that ran around election time in 2004 was right, if you don’t ‘do’ politics you don’t ‘do’ anything. When we don’t participate we let the truly important things slide into the hands of reactionary old bastards who make our country something we no longer feel attached to at all. For all their bastardry, they’re better than us because they cared enough about something to vote on it, demonstrate against or for it, argue about it, get angry about it. If we can only bring ourselves to get that heated about television or music but not governance and politics then what the hell is the point in all this? Why not sit down in our gardens gawping senselessly at the fence and periodically wailing out loud and soiling ourselves?

I’m not saying we should all become political bores talking about nothing but, those people are twats too, I’m saying care. Just a little bit. It can’t be hard to go from nothing to ‘just a little bit’. How many times has someone told you they don’t vote like they are genuinely proud of the fact? Next time it happens give them a swift backhand and come round mine for a high five. These people have given up their right to say anything about governance ever again. It’s maddening to see people not caring about the most important things in the world because they think it’s over their heads or it’s not for them. It’s for everyone, that’s pretty much the point of democracy. People who have no opinion on politics are lower down than whatever extreme hate-spewing wanker you happen to find has the most offensive views. At least this guy has the balls to attach himself to an ideal and get animated about it.

Which is not to say you should attach yourself to an ideal so totally. In fact I would recommend not nailing your flag to any mast. Observe and decide which political party or what-have-you suits you best at the time of voting. This is harder than it sounds seeing as everyone seems to be purposefully making it impossible to find out what our political parties actually stand for. It’s so worth the effort though because you are participating in the most important process you can be. Even if you just do it because it gives you a warm, smug feeling deep inside you, voting for the sake of an ego-wank is a much greater thing than not voting out of complete and total apathy. If you really can’t decide, which is absolutely understandable given the abysmal faceless mess our political parties have become particularly here in the UK, then go spoil your ballot. Step into the booth and draw a cock and balls on the paper. Write Gimpy McGurnface and draw a box next to his name with a tick in it. It makes a statement that you don’t feel reached out to, certainly more of a statement than if we sat on our arses at home watching How Clean is your Celebrity Pet from Hell while our brains trickle out of our ears. It’s better to be neutral and angry than to do nothing at all or to meekly subscribe to what our parents believe because it’s easier. If you don’t know what you want but you do know that it sure as hell isn’t what you have then let that be your message. Be more 1905 than 1917.

I know what this must all seem like but I’m not preaching, honestly. Well at least I’m not trying to do. People have told me I should go into politics but I just couldn’t do it because I don’t want to turn into a complete arsehole, or rather more of a complete arsehole if indeed you can become more of something that is already complete. I’m there and I’m going through this, like everything in our lives this is a great unknown. We’re completely puzzled by politics but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care. And we certainly can’t stop caring because it’s slow, try telling that to the Tortoise Protection Group (yes they do really exist! Google it, it’ll take less than a second!)

If you feel this bewildering blend of anger and uncertainty then let your country know about it. If my government sees me on CCTV every couple of minutes then they can start paying some fucking attention to me.

DH.

That’s not funny… yet.

My favourite joke goes like this: A magic tractor drives down a road, turns into a field. Two drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff (bu-bum tsh) and I howl laughing at myself. Several polite companions may giggle but mostly I receive the curling of the side of the mouth and a slow shaking of the head. As my mother would say this joke is ‘summat and nowt’ which I take to mean you don’t know why something so simple can make you laugh but it bloody does. The mistakes I’ve made in recent years have been mostly centred on not actually realising that not a lot of people find the same things funny. You’d be surprised the amount of trouble this has got me into.

First and foremost, and I by that I mean most painful, was during an interview last year. It was the most intimidating experience of my life; there were as many interviewers as there were interviewees sitting opposite each other down a very long table. They all had our CVs in a pile in front them and stared us down as we stammered through our ‘please employ me, I’ll be your best friend’ routines. At the break before the next round of grilling all my peers, having actually watched The Apprentice and maybe having taken a little too much of it onboard, accosted the interviewers to press flesh and essentially pimp themselves out like unusually smart Victorian prostitutes (well they already had the teeth). As the odd man out I made myself look incredibly busy making a terrible cup of tea until one of them turned to me. He began to ask me about the films of the Coen brothers and in particular Fargo that I had filed under hobbies and interests and all I could think about was how weird this conversation would be if he didn’t actually have all my information in front of him. I couldn’t help myself, I said ‘Yes that one is my favourite. How did you know that?’ There was a short but nonetheless intense silence. He replied with ‘…I have your CV in front of me.’ I mean was he thick? I was obviously making a joke. From this point there was nowhere else to go but down the route of ‘yeah I know I was just, sort of, joking about the, you know God is it hot in here?’ Some of you may be surprised to hear I didn’t get the job. That would make you an idiot.

Yes it was excruciating. To this day my friend who I often talk to before interviews answers in the same way when I ask for last minute advice: ‘Yeah just don’t tell any stupid jokes.’ And maybe that’s it. Not so much that the jokes themselves are stupid (although they most certainly are) but that they’re in stupid places, when people don’t expect to hear them. The amount of times I’ve tried to joke with customers at work just for them to look at me like I’d actually offered to come into their house on Christmas Day and piss on their kids. It’s not as if these jokes are offensive. They don’t start ‘so an Islamic extremist, a paedophile and Fred West walk into a bar – Wait where are you going?’ It’s just that there is a time and a place and if that time and place you’re in is one that jokes aren’t often heard, well then you’d better be a damn good comedian.

The difficult thing for me is that I associate this awareness with growing up and becoming sensible (read: boring) which is something I vehemently do not want to do. It drove my ex-girlfriend mad but every time we went out to dinner I would deliberately mispronounce items on the menu. My particular favourite was pronouncing Pate as ‘payt’. She hated it because she presumed others around us would think I was thick (I’m pretty sure I saw people looking quizzical or smirking derisively more than once) but I didn’t care because it amused me. Did I mention she’s an EX-girlfriend? That shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s a small piece of immaturity I don’t want to let go of. There’s got to be some way of combining a grown up real world life with silly little bursts of immaturity. Surely! Right?

If I made active attempts to not insert my foot directly into my mouth on a daily basis I’m pretty sure a good deal of fun would disappear from my life. As embarrassing as they are they’re hilarious memories months down the line. A friend of mine can tell you how well a joke about binary code of all things went down with a girl behind a bar once in Middlesbrough (a classic case of know-your-damn-audience) and it makes for quite an entertaining story. I might fail at the time but a few weeks or months transform the events into a self-deprecating tale that manages to get some laughs in the pub. In a roundabout way they work out eventually and that’s pretty much how I want everything to work out for me, a system of ‘getting there in the end’. So no I won’t stop doing it, no matter how painfully unfunny the jokes may be, no matter how toe-curling it might be for those with me because some day when I live far away from those who remember such incidents, I’ll have a whole new audience for them not to mention new victims for the creation of more stories, more laughs, more memories.

‘Oh man I remember this one time…’

DH.

Old in Clubs

I come to you from the dog end of a hangover. You know the phase, the worst of it is long gone but you still never feel quite right for the rest of the day. This particular self-inflicted punishment today is the purest form of hangover because it is literally the theme of last night stretched out and casting its shadow over the entire day after. That theme being: I am feeling not a little old before my time.

As I’ve said before this isn’t something I am unaccustomed to. My general bastardry has made me seem a good deal older in the brain than my peers. My ‘maturity’ was spoken of when I was very little but only because they hadn’t worked out it was actual the result of a sick brain transplanting experiment whereby a evil scientist (probably a Nazi one for the full flavour) replaced the brain of a newborn boy in North Yorkshire with that of a muttering seventy something who spends his weekends glaring at his wife for making those irritating little noises when she eats. For every year my body gained, my mind gained about five and this is never more apparent than in such establishments as the one I was to be found in last night. Clubs. I visited my first club in the first week of university in the spirit of jumping in feet first and meeting as many new people as possible. This is despite having a perfectly serviceable club in my home town that I refused to patronise on the basis of being a little too involved with my musical tastes and what kind of person they made me. I like clubs. There are fewer things more enjoyable than a having a group of good friends dancing like epileptic people trying to shake off cramp. There will always be however, a moment or two that makes my compatriots exchange worried glances. Let me tell you, last night I was the only one who was really into This Charming Man. I blame the fact that there were two eighteen year olds with me that night but it’s not as if I was around to enjoy The Smiths at the point of their most celebrated single. I don’t feel guilty about it, it’s a brilliant song but in the eyes of those around me I must have gained a fair few pounds, bent over a good few degrees and acquired a network of wrinkles spreading out across my face like time-lapse photography. Then again it was probably the dancing.

I’m more of a talker, much more a pub person than a club person. I’m always the one who wants to leave about an hour before the notion occurs to the rest of the party. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in a UV lit warehouse standing five deep at the bar gazing into the middle distance wondering why it is we feel the need to chuck what equates to bleach with a bit of salt (salt! Licking a lump of salt would never seem like a good idea at literally any other time. Because it’s not a good idea!) down our throats in order to feel just the right amount of confidence required to perform our anaphylactic-shock-set-to-music routine. I feel like I missed out on a set of crucial seminars on how to behave and carry yourself as a twenty something in a club. Somebody somewhere decided I should skip these classes and jump forward several hundred mental ages presumably so I could get to work as soon as possible on such epic bodies of work as this. I shudder to my very core when I see the white-shirted git, gurning away, and alcopop in hand making his looming advance from behind on a girl half his size. If I haven’t medicated myself with enough salted bleach I begin to feel embarrassed for the dancing masses because they can’t see how silly they look shuffling back and forth, arms by their sides like one of those wind-up nuns.

When I first started going out to clubs it was with a terribly pretentious attitude akin to ‘if you can’t beat them join them’. I’m ashamed to say it but the hangover of my ‘God we are so achingly cool’ early teens meant that there was still a lingering feeling that I was somehow above all this. Like I was slumming it for the night. This is bollocks of course. Nobody enjoys themselves when you start making up social hierarchies you just have to forget it all and jump in the deep end but telling people like myself to stop worrying is like telling Bob Geldof not to be a sanctimonious prat. Now I approach the battlefield that is the nightclub (who says ‘nightclub’? I’m so old!) in a different manner, like a tourist. It should be my world but it isn’t. I enjoy myself and let it all go but hope I don’t get found out, that the music won’t come to an abrupt halt, an announcement is made and I am politely asked to quickly and quietly remove myself from the club, making my way, head hanging in shame through a sea of disapproving faces muttering things like ‘old inside, he should never have been let in’ and ‘well what did he think would happen?’ and then they all presumably return to having a great time after I get turfed out.

Mind you this is a world where I have actually had to explain to people only four years younger than myself who Morecambe and Wise are. That’s not exactly a world I want to immerse myself in. I think I’ve just brought my headache back…

DH.