The postman told me what happened. Why he’d been summoned to the manager’s office when everyone, even the manager, said he hadn’t done anything wrong.
He’d come in to work as usual but today someone else had gone sick. Could he do that round instead of his normal one? Just for today? Or until the other postman was well enough to come in?
Of course. It wasn’t any kind of problem. It was just that he lived in a different place to the postie who normally did the round so he slightly, very slightly, re-arranged it so that when he delivered the last letter of the day he’d be nearest his home, after making sure that all the Special Delivery letters were delivered on time, the really expensive ones before 09:00 and the normal Specials before 13:00, just the way people expected when they bought the special delivery service.
Everything got delivered. Everything got signed for. Everything that was supposed to be delivered by nine in the morning had been and everything that had to be delivered by one in the afternoon had been as well. Which didn’t explain the furious phone call to his manager.
Because it’s Aldeburgh
Perhaps, calmly, he could just go over when he delivered all the Specials?
Quite obviously, Aldeburgh Golf Club’s flag in the 100% safe Tory seat of Suffolk Coastal couldn’t possibly be confused with any other flag in the world, ever. Except perhaps one.
Because there’s been this phone call. From some woman with a weekend house and two lazy arses of sons who couldn’t be bothered to get up when they were supposed to. Who ignored alarm clocks. Who couldn’t be asked to set the alarm on their mobiles in case it infringed their human rights. And lurk, rarely, the only way they could be made to get up is if they had to open the front door because they always got out of bed to do that in case it was a friend of theirs, yah? Say when Mummy had had to go back to London leaving Tarquin and Ollie under their fetid high thread-count duvet covers the only way they could be got onto the train was to send them a Special Delivery letter.
Except the postman couldn’t be trusted, could he? He couldn’t do this one simple thing, to deliver Special Delivery letters that normally came at about eight in the morning if you got the before nine option. Oh no. Not him. Not Mr Work To Rule. And I’m glad they’re privatised, I rarely am, frankly. Because one paid for the before nine service and do you know when it arrived? Hmmm? Do you? I said do you? 08:55, that’s when. So they missed their train. And what exactly is the Post Office gaying to do about it? Well?
And depressingly, that’s a true story, told to me by the postman.
Yes I know. He’s brilliant, isn’t he. Superb. So, so I don’t know, perceptive. I bet he’s got a voice like that on the radio too. And those books that everyone’s read, like the Man Who Did Something With A Hat or something. You’ve read it. You say you have, anyway. And the way he states the entirely obvious all the time and gives the impression this is supremely remarkable. Brilliant. Isn’t it?
The Man Who Ought To Have Stroked A Cat
He goes for a walk in Norway and there’s a bull in a field. There’d been a sign saying watch out, there’s a bull in the field but he’d ignored it. Was it in Norwegian? Why did he think it was, as he said, just a Norwegian farmer’s sense of humour? Really because the field was up a hill? Sorry, this guy’s supposed to be really intelligent, isn’t he? The same way he was when he strapped 18 months of research notes to his motorcycle seat with a bungee, rather than say, putting them in a bag so they wouldn’t fall off and blow all over the road and get lost forever.
He looks at the bull and because it’s huge and probably going to kill him he focusses on its nose. He falls down the hill and breaks his leg and thinks he’s going to freeze to death and it’s the most amazing sensation when he’s rescued and doesn’t die after all. Stunning. He has his leg in plaster for months and then has problems walking. Wow. Such insight. He loses vision in his eye and guess what? He can’t see out of it and bumps into things. And he can’t imagine what’s in the field of vision he hasn’t got, because he can’t see it.
“I documented all this in minute detail.”
Oliver, I know. So far so blah. Those pages aren’t going to fill themselves, after all.
Oh and he gets his entire existence vilified by his mother but hey, it’s just her upbringing, no biggie.
Hold on. Just back up a moment there. He says he thinks girls are alright, has a chat with his dad and says he thinks boys are a bit more so but he’s never done anything about it and best not tell mum and next morning his mother calls him an abomination and somehow none of this needs looking at in any detail whatsoever. Not the total betrayal of trust, the name-calling, the auto-hatred she’s able to switch on. Nope. That’s how she was brought up. Really. Janet And John must have had a special chapter that covered telling your doll that you wish she’d never been born if she says she likes people and haven’t done anything about it. Naturally.
I’ve never liked his writing. It isn’t fresh or as much fun for me as it is for him. I don’t get it, at all. But most of all I don’t understand why stating the obvious in a comprehensive study of self-absorption is supposed to be so enthralling.
I was reading something on a Linkedin forum. I know, ok? I’ve never really seen the point of it. You can ‘connect’ with people, but you can on Facebook and see what they had for dinner and what their cat looks like too. I think Linkedin would say it’s ‘more professional,’ because you can post your CV up and well, join in discussions. Maybe without getting in fights with total strangers the Facebook way. Although reading this morning, my first reaction was to start TYPING IN CAPITALS to show how annoyed I was. And that was when I was agreeing with someone.
It was only a thing about avoiding jargon. Harmless enough, yes? Well no, actually. Not harmless at all.
Very often, the evaluator is a young, relatively inexperienced person who has come of age in a fast -paced, digital world highly dependent upon graphics, very light on lengthy paragraphs, living in the present, unversed in the subtle distinctions of grammar.
By deduction then, we should perhaps become less inclined to favor a narrative approach to our proposals, in favor of a graphical one.
Ignore the thing about living in the present, because only a few remaining people who remember Jethro Tull are actually living in the past. Just ignore it. What we’re saying here is that somebody who needs cartoons to understand something has been given the job of evaluating million-pound proposals. Say, to build a motorway, or get the bins emptied outside every house in a city every Tuesday morning (tender must include option dates for Christmas collections). How do we deal with that?
“Best value.”
Cut and paste little bags of money in the costs section? Maybe it’s the way forward. I’m assuming we’re not going to look at the option of actually hiring anyone who can read and write properly, because that might be a bit threatening and disrupt the office dynamic. I think I’ve got that right.
The blood pressure really became an issue when I clicked on the next article. It was about integrating marketing information with business strategy and whether it was a good idea. You do know. Whether what the business should do next should be based on facts or what the chairman’s wife thought she heard at the hairdresser’s. The use of the words business and strategy in that order alone should have told me not to read it. This definitely did:
“A nice process description. I would add the need for the strategist to interwork with people in the internal team as well as the customers. By communicating the strategy internally you gain buy-in, acceptance and alignment of the organisation with the strategic goals so that all employees that contact the customer are on the same message.”
I’m quite good at work but I don’t know what interwork is. Apart from pompous, redundant drivel.
An enormous ass.
And no, I can’t think of a cartoon graphic that would illustrate the concept, apart from an enormous ass. As for gaining acceptance and alignment – let me see. Does that mean you tell people what the company’s going to do in an attempt to get them to accept it and so that staff don’t totally piss-off the customers by telling them rubbish? It’s an idea, certainly.
It’s the longest day today and up here in Scotland where I am right now, holed-up on the run in a small hotel in Tomintoul, that means the days are very, very long.
Because it’s Scotland it’s raining and it’s cold. I had to buy a sweater yesterday. I’d packed a spare but when I put it on it looked as if dogs had slept on it. Then I remembered that’s exactly what had happened back in January. That was a nice time. A hopeful time, cold but the days getting longer, one by one till now.
Near Christmas you hear Peter Gabriel’s song about ring out Solstice bells. Nobody knows what it means. It’s just another word, the way words are supposed to mean anything anyone wants them to mean now. It’s another solstice today. I don’t hear any bells ringing at all.
The place I was passing had a sale on, so I got a really nice jumper for £20. But it’s not the same as the old one. That was Italian, from Peek & Klopenburg in Dam Square, and even though it was in a sale it was a bit more than £20. It paid for itself though; I bought it back in 2002. Or 2003. I can’t really remember. I was in Amsterdam quite a bit for a while, for reasons which need not be examined too closely but were legal if not perhaps entirely moral. It depends, I think. Possibly.
Anyway.
Anyway, after today we’ll all be able to say it once again, showing our true British pessimism. Altogether now at 7pm tomorrow night please, roll your eyes skyward and say ruefully:
The little homestead Jesse James came from. It wasn’t enough for his father.
A long time ago I had a friend from Kentucky. His great grandpa had seen Jesse James ride past. It was a family ritual he was lucky enough to be just born long enough ago for this very old man to do his party piece, the same way he’d told the story to his own son, and to his grandchildren and probably anybody else who would listen, the way men do.
The little boy was lead into the old man’s presence the same way other little boys had been for the past fifty years.
“Listen, great gran’pa’s gonna tell you ’bout the time he saw Jesse James…”
Like a lot of American heroes or maybe heroes anywhere, Jesse James had what might be called interpersonal relationship issues.
A man with a limited anger management skillset.
He was born in 1847 in Missouri and got pulled into the Civil War as a teenager. It wasn’t like the song. It wasn’t big battles and flags and sad bugles, but a gang of people who went after another gang of people, preferably on their own, or at least hopefully vastly outnumbered and taken by surprise. James was fifteen when that started. After the war he took the skills he had, which were mostly killing people, and used them to rob banks and trains. Eventually one of his gang members called Robert Ford did the sensible thing and blew a hole the size of a tea-cup through him while he was hanging a picture in a house he’d rented.
There were popular stories which had the James gang as latter-day Robin Hoods, but the people they robbed didn’t think so. The ones who survived, anyway. It was a time when there weren’t police, interstates, paved roads in Missouri, cars, indoor lavatories or pretty much anything else we have now.
So the little boy, like generations of little boys before him stood in awe at the old man’s knee while older men, his brothers and uncles who’d all heard the story at the same knee stood there and smirked, waiting to hear it again.
“Did I ever tell you ’bout the time I saw Jesse James? I was about as big as you are now when he rode past me on his horse, about as close as you’re standing. I could’ve reached out and touched him.”
And the little boy’s eyes went wide and the older boys and men nudged each other and winked and waited as the little boy said, the same way they’d said for half a century and more, “So what did you do, g’paw?”
And the old man paused and maybe looked around the rest of his audience, judging the pause even though it was a true story, before he thought the time was right to tell the little boy about outlaws and the people who weren’t before he said quietly:
A joke. A pathetic one. There ought to be another control pot, labelled “Fakeness.” It should go all the way to 12.
I saw one of these in a shop window about ten years ago. I thought it was a joke then. I still do now, except this is a joke for people with two grand to spray up the wall.
Are the soles curling off of your blue suede shoes? Do your flabby arms chaffe when you windmill your guitar? Is your quiff, let’s face it, not quite as stiff as it used to be?
Ladies and elderly gentlemen, you need a Fender Relic.
Here are some words. I know all of them, just not in this order.
Fender USA Custom Shop 60’s HSS Strat guitar heavy relic Daphne Blue
As the ad says, 100% genuine and all original, but obviously it means 100% genuine fake. A ’60s guitar is what it says in one sentence, but a 2012 guitar not even 20 words on.
“Let’s talk about the finish first…” Oh do let’s, as they say in Enid Blyton books, which are more realistic than anything about this guitar or the company selling it now.
Relic® – There and back and still here today.The authentic worn-in wear of a guitar that has experienced many years of regular use in clubs and bars. Marks that tell a story, finish checking all over the body, and scars, dings and dents from bridge to headstock.
Can we have a look at that? Or doesn’t the Sale of Goods Act apply any more? It isn’t authentic because it’s fake. It isn’t worn in wear, because it’s fake. It hasn’t experienced many years of anything, because it’s three years old. It certainly hasn’t been played in clubs and bars regularly, if at all. The marks it has tell a story, certainly. A story of fake. It’s fake. Everything about it is fake. A fake story about a desperate company selling fake guitars to desperate fake posers. Jeez, I thought I was bad enough. Even I wouldn’t buy one of these. Not even women who’ve had screaming fits at me would accuse me of that.
This model that I have for sale here is a ‘Heavy Relic’ – a custom order Relic with just a little more ‘World Tour’ treatment !!
Many people think why would you buy a guitar that has been artificially aged ? The answer is very simple – the LOOK !.. and the feel. This guitar plays like new (because it is) rather than an old worn out Strat with a part-warped neck.
“How’s about that then,guys’n’gals?”
Why bother buying a Mexican Strat and a packet of sandpaper and still having change out of £400? I mean, that just wouldn’t be authentic, would it? It’s the look, after all. That’s got to cost £1600 on its own. Sandpaper isn’t cheap you know. Except actually, in real life, it is.
It was sunny this morning. I’d almost got enough sleep. I put the new flashing pedals on my really nice bike, the ones I got on Ebay for £9 instead of the £35 they ought to cost, and rode it down to the paper-shop, four miles away through the empty lanes. Then up the back road past the Old Vicarage (no, not that Old Vicarage, the one in my head, the one in Not Your Heart Away, that would be altogether too perfect, even for today), along a lane past the big weekend houses with huge name plates on their doors, probably so the once every month in the summer and probably at Christmas this year dependings (yes of course with a hyphen) can recognise their own house when they go there. And then into a place I’d never been before that somebody told me about yesterday, an ancient little wood full of bluebells and wild garlic, a perfect place I would once have loved to walk dogs in with someone gone, where the centuries sleep deep.
And from there to the boot sale where I managed to buy a huge old terracotta wine cooler and some geraniums to put in it, and on to the well, let’s call it an objet trouve market at Snape Maltings, where because nobody else wanted it I bought the shirt I saw there this time last year for £7 because it had the wrong label on it I’m pretty sure, where I had a chat with a nice woman about lamps made of old film projectors, then on up the back lane to home just as the rain was starting and managed to get the washing in before it got soaked.
“Yes, that’s mine. Are you sure you wouldn’t mind driving? I’d be really grateful…”
Then asparagus and scrambled eggs for lunch and polenta made for dinner which will be that and partridge breasts and inevitably at this time of year, more asparagus, bought for £6 as ‘Kitchen Grade” for about 2 kilos in a big plastic bag so it’s not straight but tastes brilliant from a huge barn on a deserted farm I’m not telling you where. But near here.
The asparagus soup is ready for the freezer, and the tea is in a mug next to me, and I know what I’m doing with this training course now after the best and worst week doing it. I spent half an hour telling myself I was packing it up on Wednesday night. Then I spent rather longer telling myself to stop being so stupid and get on with it. Result: best marks on the course so far.
Small things
But nice things. And things to be grateful for. Plus I bought a really good Gunter Grass I haven’t read yesterday, for my coat pocket for the week, still thinking that one day I will go into the perfect place that doesn’t exist and someone beautiful and kind and totally not deranged or with someone will finally say ‘all my life I’ve been waiting to meet the other person who likes that book. My car’s outside. Would you mind driving, because I have this not-at-all serious thing that affects beautiful and sensitive people who can’t be arsed to drive right at the moment. And anyway, you’ll enjoy driving it. In fact, you could drive me to my place in the Cotswolds if you like. Were you doing anything for the weekend?‘
Stranger stuff than that has happened in my life before. Much stranger. And until it does I’ve still got a cup of tea and stuff to do that I can do. And Ali Smith’s The Accidental to read as well, which is making me smile. A lot. This is a nice weekend.
Once upon a time in a world long ago, everybody loved Gary Glitter. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Parents hated him, but they didn’t know they had a good reason to and not the one they thought. He was everything you wanted in a rockNroll star. He had ludicrous shoes. He was dressed all in glitter. Geddit? He had shoulder pads that made the girls in Abba and Dynasty look as if they weren’t even trying. He had stupid hair and bulging eyes that made him look either hyperthyroid, perpetually amazed or very possibly both. And his lyrics and tunes were simple to the brink of moronic. What more could you ask for in a budget version of Meatloaf? We had simple tastes back then.
Paul Francis Gadd as he answered to in court was once a dustman, drank a bottle of vodka before he got out of bed, and did the warm-up stuff to get the audience going on Ready Steady Go. I just know, ok? I didn’t see it. More importantly, he fronted the Glitter Band.
They were literally unreal. A big tenor sax blast, a really simple drum-heavy beat and guitar-work that wouldn’t challenge – well, I was going to say somebody with two fingers, but given that includes Django Reinhardt it hardly counts. We used to call it RockNRoll whichever part it was, as the man himself did, but it was a made-up RockNRoll, more Cozy Powell drum-fest than anything Bill Haley ever dreamed up.
It didn’t matter. If you were down the Friday Club school disco with a bottle of cider and some aspirins, standing in your high-waist bags and platform soles, freezing in your sweat-soaked clothes outside in the dewy field, the collar of your v-neck t-shirt layered over the collar of your v-neck jumper layered over the collar of your tartanesque sports jacket, trying to get one last snog in before whoever it was’s Dad floodlit the pair of you with his Volvo headlights outside the cricket pavilion you’d know exactly who Gary Glitter was. If you want to pretend you don’t, Craig Brown described him as like ‘an oven-ready Terry Scott.’ And you do know, anyway.
Got it now? Good. He was the leader. He was the leader. He was the leader of the gang.
Yes, ok. Alright. I know he’s a paedophile. Everyone knows that now. But we didn’t know it then. And he was great.
That said, when I was reading an English grammar text today that declined the verb ‘to love’ two thoughts came to me.
The first, in what is clearly pre-senile infantilism, obsessive memory or just plain silly was to continue the declension “I love, you love” with the inevitable “my only true love,” as Mr Gadd taught us all, somewhat more memorably than anything the crew of ex-Spanish Civil War International Brigade recruits who were dragged out of retirement to teach me Latin ever managed. The second was more prudently: ‘Don’t. Just utterly don’t. Ever.’
Don’t sing it. Don’t play it. Certainly don’t mime it. Not even at a Christmas party. Even twenty years ago Blur said modern life is rubbish. (Did that hurt, Xers? Sorry. A bit) It’s certainly a lot duller than it used to be, sometimes.
I was told this recipe recently. Apparently (the word you use when you don’t want to keep saying ‘I was told’) it can be smoked or not smoked, as you wish, but you get sort-of bacon and you know what’s in it. Belly pork used to be really cheap. I think it depends if a TV show has used it recently.
So, bish, bash, bosh, me old china muckers, gertcha, or something.
Cheat’s Bacon
1kg pork belly
1kg salt
200g brown sugar
A plastic bucket
Take half the salt and put it in the bottom of the bucket. Rub the sugar into the pork. Put the pork on the salt. Pour the rest of the salt over the pork. Leave it for 24 hours. Then take it out, wash it in water and it is ready for use.
You can smoke it or slice it up and use it as bacon exactly as it is. Apparently.
The boxy big cars chased each other into the disused place. Something was burning in an oil drum. A man in a vest looked out of the window of a caravan as the bonnet of the Jag flew up and the back end of the Granada slid out sideways on the oily ground. Parts of London like this you couldn’t tell if the Luftwaffe did it or the LCC. Certainly the second one did more damage. In black and white the men with the big tie knots and lapels hit the men with half a pair of tights off her indoors over their faces, flattening flattened noses. Iron jemmies slid from parka sleeves and someone shouted about a shooter but we knew who would win long before Reagan sneered “Shut it” and “Tell him, George” and the man with longer hair glanced sideways before he said “You do not have to say anything. If you do say anything it may be taken down and used in evidence” before he was faded out into something more interesting. Cuff him. Get in the car. They want us back in the office.
One last job, son. Or I can shut the boot lid.
Last time I went to Paddington Basin that’s what it was like. Well, not really, but it looked like that. Derelict, like a lot of London when I first went there and for a long, long time after that. What the bombers had missed (most of it) economics and the paid, trained planners had finished off. The docks were derelict apart from St Katherine’s toy boat harbour and they filmed huge parts of The Sweeney film there. You can see exactly where, just by the bridge.
I went for a job interview. The train was late coming out of Wickham Market. The Tube got stuck in a tunnel. When I got to the interview the girl on Reception told me the company had moved, although this was the address the recruitment agency gave me. I Googled them on my phone and called the company. I tracked them down on Google maps and found that if you type in their address the GIS thinks they’re in East London, seven miles away, but if you give it the postcode it tells you they’re less than five minutes walk. For a company that’s been here in the UK for ten years I don’t understand why their website is all American references and hardly anything at all about London or the UK.
There wasn’t time for the one hour interview when I got there. They asked if I wanted to come back and do it again but I told them things happen, that it’s how you deal with them that makes the difference. That if they were happy to do the interview then I was. In fifteen minutes they asked me back for a second interview and asked me if I was happy with that. I said I’d be happier if they just gave me the job now but that’s what I’d come to get as an outcome.
The agency said they’d asked for confirmation of the meeting and hadn’t been told the office had moved. In the middle of the week I had a phone call to tell me there was a test for the second interview and that would be next week. I got the text emailed to me at 17:26 on the Friday, with a deadline of 11pm Sunday.
I very seriously thought of simply not doing it. At least I’d have one when they said in the interview, “Do you have any questions for us?”
Well yes, I do actually. What did I have to cancel this weekend? What arrangements had I already made? Oh sorry, you can’t answer that, can you? And you don’t care either.
They were using a version of Word my version couldn’t understand, because the whole point of Microsoft is to keep you buying things you don’t need at £300 a go every time Bill Gates fancies another one of his secretaries. It took hours finding free software to convert one version into another before I could even read what the test actually was. That took me to 01:00 Saturday and I had a course booked all day Saturday starting at 08:00 and running through till six that I couldn’t get out of and didn’t want to anyway. I’d booked it weeks previously.
I got the test mostly finished around half-past one Sunday morning. I didn’t have time to do anything to it that morning because the course started again at 08:00 and ran through till lunchtime. Then I had to be on a train to London to do something on Monday I’d also arranged, another job. One that hadn’t messed me around. I had time to do a little editing on Sunday night before the deadline but I couldn’t get the bullet points to line up whatever I did.
I wasn’t happy with the flow of the piece but given I didn’t know what it was about anyway I didn’t entirely see what I could do about that. We talked about all of this at the interview on Tuesday. They said the email should have been sent earlier in the week. They apologised it had been sent so late. They said that wasn’t part of the test. I think they lied.
I didn’t get the job because they wanted a typist. They said I should do more than this, but not for them. And I agree. As I left the interview I accidentally took the picture at the top of these words on my phone. I’d thought I was in a good mood. See my face? That’s my face, that is. I think I wasn’t happy.
Wild West End
Then I saw the sandwich stall being trundled away by two men. Argentinian pampas-raised beef in a wrap £6.50. And £650 for a no-cooker bedsit one room halfway to Heathrow. It wouldn’t have taken long to get tired of this. As the train took me back to Suffolk I remembered the Sweeney, the grime and the sense of things abandoned that used to be London and the glass and chrome and chip wrappers that it is now, with TK Max standing proudly where there used to be a music gear shop in the Charing Cross Road. It’s not quite the same, somehow.
On your left as you pass down the street you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the site of the place where in the song Wild West End, Mark Knopfler got a pickup for his steel guitar. Now you can buy last season’s Ralph Lauren in a peculiar colour and something a bit wrong with the zip in the very same place.
About a million years ago one August I cycled through the back streets of Kings Cross, through piles of rubble. A kestrel hovered overhead in London’s hot diesel sky. There was nobody around as far as I could see. I don’t even know where that is now. You can’t go back. The past is another country. They do things differently there. And I’m not doing this again.
