The moving finger rants

Moving in with my girlfriend. I have been a little concerned about this. I don't want to turn into one of those couples. The student lifestyle has suited me well for the last ten years, and this is a dangerous step on the road towards becoming a Smug Married.

In order to keep removal costs down (in true Scots style) I am moving half of the stuff myself, by hand, demonstrating self-reliance and pluck and stick-to-it-iveness (in true British style). It's only a fifteen minute walk to the new place, forty-five minutes when laden with a box roughly the same size as I am. I believe the appropriate verb is to schlep (in true Yiddish style).

Struggling across the Meadows this morning with a box that—just—fits into two Ikea bags (one over either end, to give it handles), pausing every five minutes to get some feeling back into my fingers, I realized that this thing would have no weight at all if it was shared between two people.

There's a metaphor for something here, if I could only put my finger on what.

For the last eight-and-a-bit years I have been involved in a general boycott of Northern Foods products, dating from the time when they tried to fire me on fabricated charges in order to save themselves my paltry pre-minimum-wage salary. Thus far I've cost them several orders of magnitude more money than the month's wage they would have had to pay me before I left them anyway.

(And I quit them before they fired me.)

(And now I come to think about it, they had to pay me a month in lieu of notice anyway. Bonus!)

This means no Fox's Biscuits for me, no Pork Farms, no Matthew Walker Christmas puddings, and no pretty much anything sold by Marks & Spencer. I don't miss any of these things. (Especially not the Christmas puddings.) I do make an exception for Goodfella's pizzas, though, because Goodfella's pizzas are deliciousness incarnate.

Goodfella's pizzas, however, are the ones that try far too hard to be cool. At one stage the back of the packet said Cook for twenty minutes; try watching the cheese slowly melt and bubble as if nobody had anything better to do. I recall spudtater cutting the cooking instructions off the packet, so he could prove to people that real unmitigated stupidity did exist.

These are the same people who wouldn't listen to me when I told them that Pizza Pie was a daft name because pizza means pie. I notice that they stopped selling those about as soon as they came out.

They've changed the cooking instructions so that they now read you could use this time to prepare a mixed salad, which is terribly socially-responsible of them.

Now, I notice that that every packet comes with a peppy exhortation to Share and enjoy!. The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation is evidently alive and well.

Last time I was down in Hull, I noticed that they'd demolished the headquarters building where my office had been on the fourth floor. I wish I'd been able to see that.

My sister has just emailed me a copy of my grandfather's war memoirs. None of us even knew he'd written them.

My internal editor is screaming at me, but it's all so very him, so I haven't changed anything—I haven't even converted it from a .doc.

A Private's War
or, What did you do grandpa?

At the going down of the Sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Who remembers BBC Programming for Schools and Colleges? They'd wheel in a massive metal trolley with a gigantic television at an adult's head height. We would all be made to sit cross-legged in front of it, craning our necks upwards at its cyclopean glory, supplicant before the televisual altar.

Two teachers would manhandle a gargantuan bakelite videocassette, the size of a box of Milk Tray, into a top-loading VCR with valves and steam vents protruding from the back. A hushed silence would descend as—behold!—the vast Screen would lazily flicker to life, like a sleeping god, and upon its mighty Face would appear a single Clock, counting down.

No human agency could affect the sedate passage of that intransigent second hand. Nor all thy piety nor wit could lure it back to cancel half a deathly, final Tick. The seconds would disappear into the past, one by one, as if sliced from our lives by Death's own scythe. Children visibly aged as the BBC decreed that this minute of our lives would be spent in silent, appreciative contemplation. Should any child—gripped, perhaps, by a prepubescent frenzy of rash indiscretion—have the temerity to break gaze with the Screen and glance about him, he would find himself surrounded by a carpet of wizened greybeards. Perhaps he might recognize them as those classmates who, only minutes before, were as youthful and vibrant as he.

No child ever looked, though, because the Screen held us all in its hypnotic grip. And as we gazed into the Screen, the Screen also gazed into us.

Again and again the seconds were cleaved from that monolithic Clock, one after another after another.

Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick....

And then—O perfect and divine wonder! a blessing from the Lord of Television!—some coloured plasticine would appear on the Screen and unroll itself into the word Watch! while someone played a penny whistle.

Some guy would then show up and tell us about different types of shoes, or how film sets were all made of plywood if you looked at them from the back. It didn't seem to matter much. We had looked into the Screen, and deep within our childish hearts we knew: the Screen had looked into us, and the Screen had found us wanting.

~

My memory of early childhood may be somewhat skewed, largely since that entire period happened to someone else, but I remember the Screen. What was it Mister Eldritch said to Olivia?...

The reason I bring this up is that the Demon Internet hold music, which I have had to sit and listen to four times today, is the same 1970s plinky acoustic-guitar thing that they used before the Clock. I always imagined a typical 1970s session musician, looking a lot like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, sitting on a stool and plucking idly at a guitar in the smallest and shabbiest of the BBC recording studios. No score and no instructions. Just sit there and improvise for a minute and a half. Here's your ten shillings and a lukewarm tea from the BBC canteen, now it's back out onto Wood Lane with you and back to the busking.

Now I have the theme from Watch! in my head. And it won't go away.

And the Angel of the LORD came amongst them, saying unto them: Do not fear, for thou dost not really need hot water at this the coldest time of the year....

( Long )

I don't generally do Christmas (as some of you may have noticed) and I'm not a big fan of religion (as some of you might have noticed). That said, I'm feeling quite Christmassy right now, as if I want to do something nice for some orphans.

The problem is that I don't know any orphans. So I shall have to make some first.

(One of a series, it would seem, of interminable and convoluted ramblings on subjects of which I am probably not qualified to speak.)

Psychotherapy session today included the phrase I have trained you well, young padawan (me to her, natch), and also I'm sorry, I don't mean to patronize—and `patronize', of course, means `to talk down to someone'.

( On personality )

~

On another note: and the Trogdor comes in the NIIIGHT!!! to a river in Mexico.

--
[0] I notice that I turned the conversation into a more general academic discussion in order to avoid talking about me. Again. And the shrink didn't call me on it. Bad psychotherapist, bad.

[1] I probably do have a middle gear: it's the one I use when I'm Performing Excellent Customer Service or when Meeting The Parents. It's the socially-mediated gear one uses when one is pretending to be someone else. So it can still be argued that I don't have a middle gear, and in any case it's irrelevant to the succeeding discussion.

[2] Those of you who think I'm treating my taxpayer-funded course of mental healthcare with a degree of flippancy are missing the point. I know what I'm doing, and it's taking years anyway, so I may as well have some fun while I'm doing it. Besides, it's way more entertaining for you lot this way. I live to serve.

[3] I think it was a teacher. It may have been an orthodontist. I have suddenly spotted the problem with the use, as the main thrust of my thesis, of an aphorism I read in a Reader's Digest seventeen years ago.

[4] Actually, what he said was probably something very similar, in Italian.

[5] [3]

[6] I suspect that being able to sing had something to do with it, as well.