The moving finger rants

I was in self-imposed isolation when the national lockdown began on 27th March. When I emerged, fourteen days later, blinking into the daylight as might a newborn babe, the world had changed. Edinburgh had become a ghost town. The few people one could see on the streets all looked vaguely shell-shocked. I found it difficult to resist the urge to whistle the soundtrack to 28 DAYS LATER while walking around.

I've always found those animated advertising hoardings somewhat dystopian, but now they were all reading SUPPORT YOUR HEALTHCARE WORKERS and then SHOP RESPONSIBLY and then an advert for lager, because Scotland, and then IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER. It's possible I imagined that last one.

I was given a letter that I must carry on my person at all times, authorizing me to travel as an essential worker. Blue observed that being told by my employer that I'm an essential worker is roughly equivalent to being told by a stripper that I'm her favourite. The hotel has been closed but there's still a need for a security presence, and we've been taking the opportunity to do some deep-cleaning. So I'm basically a night watchman now. But at least I have a job.

Since then everything has changed again, and again, and we speak fondly but with a lingering bewilderment of the before-times. And today is the grand reopening of most businesses in Scotland. Everything's going back to normal, except it's really not.

I know we're ready, at my place of work—plastic screens and signage everywhere, QR codes all over the place, mandatory sanitizing stations, staff all trained and drenched in PPE—but I question whether society is ready. I'm in customer service: I talk to humans for a living. I'm not optimistic.

Eleven people on the rota today, to take care of all of our guest. With that sort of staff-to-customer ratio, I think we deserve an extra star.

See you on the flipside, folks.

Oh folks, hello folks. Tell me your personal canons. What's 100% true for you that isn't supported by the evidence?

Here are mine:

• Season 6B.
• The Romulans' backstory from the Rihannsu novels.
• Elliot Pope is an unreliable narrator, and The Deadly Assassin didn't happen.
• Sito Jaxa survived the events of Lower Decks. She was either on a super-secret mission that even Picard didn't know about, or she was captured by the Cardassians and released after the war.
• John and Nancy totally got together when they grew up. I hope they survived the war.
• The Daleks deployed the [or a] Time Destructor during the early stages of the Time War, which explains why the Doctor lost fifty years off his stated age somewhere between Sylvester McCoy and David Tennant.
• Edward II wasn't killed at Berkeley Castle. He lived afterwards as a hermit in Europe.
• John Harrison was merely the first of the Augments to be woken from cryofreeze when Admiral Marcus found the Botany Bay. With his genetically engineered intellect, he was smart enough to claim to be Khan.
• Fall Out was another drug-induced hallucination, just like Living In Harmony or A, B, & C. Shattered Visage is personal soft canon.

Those are mine. What are yours?

I've been investigatin electropop lately, most of the current batch of which appears to be Canadian for some reason. I have no problem with this. At least it's not Canadian hip-hop. Movin on from the Canadian theme before I get myself into trouble, at this stage I feel I should mention CHVRCHES, who claim that their band name is pronounced churches, but I know better. They are from Glasgow and they are awesome. Particularly the lead singer, Lauren Mayberry, who is cute and elfin and adorable and basically so much the complete opposite of Shirley Manson that she goes round the back of the spectrum and becomes exactly as amazing. Chvrches spell their name with a V so that you can google for them, which you should do immediately if you've not already done so.

I have this 160GB mp3 player to fill up, and it's an actual mp3 player this time, so I can't cheat by includin the complete Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who and all the seasons of Sherlock I haven't watched yet. It's got to be actual music, and even for me there's only so many versions of the Glorious Ninth I need to carry around with me in my pocket. (A post on which is forthcomin; suffice to say I renounce all former allegiances to Karajan.) Somebody on the Twitters recommended the New Order album Power, Corruption & Lies, which I've not actually listened to. When it was released in 1983, my listenin habits were more or less evenly split between Prokoviev and Pinky & Perky. (I was precocious, but I was also three years old.) That I have not got round to it since then is an omission I knew I must rectify forthwith—but, in my defence, do any of you realize how many different versions there are of the Glorious Ninth?

Listenin then, at last, to Power, Corruption & Lies, three or four tracks reminded me of That Goddamn American Express Advert that I remember seeing once. And then, finally, it arrived in my ears as some part of me knew it would: Blue Monday, the biggest-selling 12" single of all time.

Of course I knew it already. And, because I was cursèd to grow up in the nineties, I knew it already chiefly because of this:

Even back then I was aware that this was possibly the worst advert of all time. I envisioned a cadre of corpulent besuited bastards, cocaine-crazy and caffeinated, masturbatorily manifesting moronic muppetry, thuswise: it's time for an EMERGENCY MARKETING MEETING!

INT. DAY. The MID-NINETIES. Opulent CORPORATE BOARDROOM

(PROPS DEPARTMENT: please make sure there is a RED STAPLER somewhere in shot)

TWAT #ONE is agitatedly pointin a STICK at a FLIPCHART that has some damn GRAPH on it.

TWAT #ONE
Okay, we're the wealthiest and most expensive credit card company on the planet, we own all the money in the world, and each of us has a secondary personal Learjet just so we can ship around the team of flunkies required to wax our primary Learjets, but but we need more. More... flirting?... sorry, that's a whole different advert that hasn't been made yet, with subtler humour than this scene. Anyway. I understand there's an entire new generation of suckers who have money. So: who knows anything about this "youth demographic"?

TWAT #TWO
Well, from what I've read in the newspapers, the Youth Demographic really do like their "music with a repetitive beat".

TWAT #ONE
Excellent. Let's have some of that. Anyone else?

TWAT #THREE
They like... skydiving?

TWAT #ONE
Brilliant. Throw that in there. What else?

TWAT #FOUR
I heard that they really like skin-tight black PVC trenchcoats.

TWAT #ONE
Who doesn't? You're fired. Next!

[VO] prolonged nasal SNORTING noise

TWAT #FIVE looks up from the table, takes a moment to orient himself

TWAT #FIVE
They like... geishas pulling stupid faces?

TWAT #ONE
Give that man some stock options.

~ FIN ~

I have always said that I hated the bloody Nineties: the decade of Westlife and the Vengaboys and Columbine and backwards jeans and Global Hypercolor and pastels and plaid and the Bosnian genocide and the Doctor Who Movie. But! (Even before you start: that was a preemptive but.) To be fair to the nineties, we also had Dark Season (so much pastel! and Jacqueline Pearce!) and Knightmare and Animaniacs and Way Out West and Portishead and we had both Ren and Stimpy simultaneously.

I've made my peace with the nineties.

After all, if we're considrin solely the restricted subset of credit card advertizin, then it could be so very, very much worse.