Ortance

That last post was a bit gloomy, wasn't it?!

What am I like?

Life is brilliant now. This isn't sarcasm. I know it seems like it is, but it isn't.

Let's wash the taste of despair out of our mouths and hair with a refreshing sorbet. What kind of sorbet? A sorbet of proportion.

Things are fine here, and things are fine with me.

No need to worry about us. We're through the worst of it. It's practically summer now.

I haven't had much time for coming up with "funny" ideas, so I need to climb back on that pony and force it to wear a technicolour wig.

I did spend a lot of time working on a tweet about imps yesterday. You don't see many references to imps nowadays, so I thought it might be a fresh area to explore.

I remember having an audio cassette as a child (remember "children"?), on which was a story about an imp. I don't remember enough specifics to track it down. All I remember was that the imp wreaked (wrought?) havoc in a kitchen. I can't even remember who was in the right. Was it the chef or the imp? Both are known for their unpredictability and stupid hats.

That's all I know about imps.

I now know slightly more about imps, as I've read their Wikipedia page.

Here's an imp:

She looks uncomfortable.

That's right: she. I'm not an imp sexist.

Judging by the description, the Superman antagonist Mr Mxyzptlk (one of the greatest names in comics) seems to be a kind of imp.

He's a mischievous, magical being, who Superman is too noble to punch. He's a bit like the basically-exactly-the-same Fantastic Four antagonist, The Impossible Man:

Sadly, this panel isn't followed by The Thing beating him to death.

That's all I know about imps. For realsies this time.

So I was working on an imp-based tweet.

Twitter jokesmiths have covered almost every word, object, or concept, so you need to stay one step ahead of the game. Originality is a rare beast. You need to type something that no-one has typed before. That's why I went for imps. No-one will have done a joke about imps.

But I found that there's a reason for that.

There aren't any good jokes about imps.

Wordplay is the obvious starting point. My first thought was doing an impulse/"imp pulse" joke.

E.g. "I hadn't planned to check the mischievous fairy's heartbeat, but in the end I did it on imp pulse."

Not good.

Not. Good.

Then I wondered about some kind of pimp reference. But how would that work? Some variation on "that really puts the 'imp' in 'pimp'"? What would be the set-up?

Some kind of "imp rest"/impressed joke?

After several hours of thinking, and several tree's worth of paper screwed up on the floor (nothing was written on the paper, I just needed to vent my frustration), I began to lose confidence in the imp tweet idea. Are imps really that original? Shouldn't I be tweeting something political or topical or edgy?

Imps aren't political or topical. They're quite edgy, but only in a whimsical middle-ages kind of way. Back then, anyone who didn't wear a bonnet was considered edgy. Wreaking havoc in a kitchen was their Johnny Rotten.

So I abandoned the idea. I went in search of a different word; one that was rare and hilarious and full of potential.

Then it hit me.

Nickel.

Pretty good, right?

Nobody tweets about nickel.

The possibilities are numerous with nickel.

It's important to note, however, that I'm only talking about nickel the metal. I am emphatically NOT talking about the American coins. Nickel is funny. "A nickel" or "nickels" are not.

I'm worried that this distinction will limit my ability to appeal to a US audience. They might see some of my hilarious nickel tweets, and miss the point entirely.

"Nickels aren't funny," they might say.

"You're absolutely right," I'd say. "Nickels aren't funny. But nickel is funny."

They'd be able to discern the bolding and italicising in my voice, and would be forced to agree.

Nickel will be such a fruitful comedy area, that I'll devote a whole new Twitter account to it. To avoid the above confusion, I couldn't use the Twitter name @nickel (which in any case is probably already taken). I'd have to use @nickelthemetal

Nickel!

Nobody tweets about nickel.

Nickel makes imp seem positively mainstream in comparison. They'll be doing jokes about imps (and the difference between men and women, and Facebook, and Anne Widdecome) on Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow. But no-one will be doing nickel material.

I'll have cornered the market.

Good old nickel (the metal)! You're going to be my ticket to fame.

I'll just do a bit of research.

There. I now know slightly more about nickel.

Hey, check this out:

In medieval Germany, a red mineral was found in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) that resembled copper ore. However, when miners were unable to extract any copper from it, they blamed a mischievous sprite of German mythology, Nickel (similar to Old Nick), for besetting the copper. They called this ore Kupfernickel from the German Kupfer for copper.

A... mischievous sprite of German mythology...?

But doesn't that sound similar to an... imp?

What do imps and nickel have in common? Why, out of all the random words I might have thought of, do these two share a bond?

IS GOD TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING?

SOMETHING ABOUT IMPS AND NICKEL?

This is why comedy is so difficult. You try to be original, but you end up being embroiled in a chemical-mythological conspiracy that drives you insane.

John Bishop has the right idea. He wouldn't touch nickel with a ten-foot pole.

Boxes

We moved.

I'll probably write about the whole process at some point, but for now... it almost seems that writing about it would somehow taint the purity of the agony. It was so bad that the suffering has travelled in time. Everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen is worse than it was a week ago.

So I need some mulling time. Maybe a little perspective. Maybe I'll realise what a privileged position I'm actually in.

But it won't be today, and it won't be tomorrow.

Instead, here's a big green asterisk:

*

Exhaust Pipe

I've had a blank draft post called Exhaust Pipe sitting here for a couple of days. I don't know what I was going to write about. I am exhausted, but I don't own a car or a pipe. It was probably going to be something hilariously left-field.

We're moving house tomorrow.

We had our last walk into work this morning. Not the last walk into work ever, but the last walk into work from our current flat. We've been doing the walk for five years, so it was quite emotional.

When we first started the walk, this blog was only a few months old. Imagine that. Now the blog is as bearded and jaded and jade-bearded as I am.

Because it was our last walk (using that particular route), we had to say goodbye to those old familiar sights.

Goodbye, Murray's postbox.

Goodbye, woman-who-used-to-be-pregnant-and-now-has-a-son.

Goodbye McCoy, the crinkle-faced dog in the window of North Oxford Property Services.

Goodbye, some bush.

Goodbye, house-on-Winchester-Road-that-we-want-to-live-in-some-day.

Goodbye, car with the 'GNU' numberplate.

Goodbye, corpse. We'll miss you most of all. Even if you're not much of a corpse anymore. You're more of a lumpy puddle studded with jewellery.

This kind of sentimentality is a handicap. You can't assign gravitas to everything. If everything has gravitas, nothing does. I believe Einstein said something to that effect.

And this is just the walk!

When we have to say goodbye to our flat, we'll be in real trouble. We have a real emotional connection to those walls and chairs and stains. It reminds of that Jeffrey Lewis song that I'm not going to listen to, in case I start blubbing at my desk.



Time adds significance to the most banal of interactions. If you use the same Game Boy for thirteen years, it becomes a profound bond, even though it's just a machine. Time really does make fools of us all - not by proving us wrong, but by making us care about inanimate objects.

We have second thoughts about binning a colander that got us through some tough times, even though all of its holes are clogged up by other colanders.

We lovingly finger a door handle, because we've been touching it every day since Diana died.

We hesitate before cutting into a stuffed pig toy that may not have even been ours in the first place.

Sentimentality is the fetishisation of loss. There's a cheap, empty profundity to things existing and then not existing. It's a fundamental human impulse to feel emotionally close to a meaningless past. That's why Forrest Gump was so popular.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make here. I seem to be attacking my own sentimentality for no particular reason. I like sentimentality.

Sometimes I just start writing things, and get dragged into a strange direction by my fingers.

It's probably what makes this blog such an honest and interesting work of art. You have a real insight into my thinking, because I have no control over my typing.

Any psychiatrist would have a field day, as long as they could stop themselves dozing off.

Anyway, the move promises to be a harrowing experience. There will be snow and heavy lifting. There will probably be disappointment and rats. There will be a week without internet access. But, by the end of it all, I'll be living in a place with a dishwasher.

We can all take comfort in that, even if we've dislocated both of our shoulders whilst trying to lift a bath.

Obfuscation

Dr Bartholomew: I think fog might be trying to contact me.

Leslie Bath-Morgan: Why do you say that?

Dr Bartholomew: I just checked my phone and I have a mist call.

***

The above is an extract from my new play called I Haven't The Foggiest, which will be performed this spring. It's five hours of fog puns, but is also a thickly-veiled allegory of Black Wednesday.

All seats are obscured-view, so prices are low. There are still quite a few remaining because I refuse to tell anyone what or where the venue is. Leave that to the marketing people, I say.

I've got an itchy hand. It might have been bitten by something small. Scratching your hand makes you look suspicious. No-one trusts someone who can't marshal their own skin.

I'm going to try not to think about it.

It snowed this morning. I really wish I hadn't destroyed all of my sledges last night. Even at the time, I thought: "if it snows tomorrow, I'll regret this". But I'd had a few to drink and a few to stay, and we were merry and carefree, and our axes were burning (figurative) holes in our hands, and the sledges were all over the beds and we wanted to go to sleep.

How were we to know that it would snow?

Thinking about it, it might have been snowing at the time. We didn't raise the blinds to check. It would have been easy, but we didn't do it. If we had raised the blinds, and seen the beginning of a mighty blizzard, the destruction of the sledges might have been averted, or at least toned down.

But the snow and the axes fell, oblivious of each other, like two friends driving to the same party, unaware that they might have saved on petrol money by sharing a car.

Life is never as tidy as we think it should be. Things only make sense in retrospect. Decisions are only correct when you look back. In fact, decisions are only decisions when you look back. At the time, they're just guesses at random, darts on a board, the toss of a coin, the selection of a playing card from under a shawl. The four of diamonds? No. Of course not.

Choice is plummeting down a ravine, landing at the bottom, and claiming to have chosen the jutting skull-breaker on the way down.

I had no sledges this morning. It was snowing, and I had no sledges.

We did have several sleighs, though. They were extremely comfortable. The loss of the sledges wasn't much of a concern. We all climbed aboard our sleighs, pulled by neighbourhood dogs, and threw axe-heads to the local children.

I love Mondays.

Summons

We all hate it when our friends become successful as butlers.

Behind the pats on the back and the congratulationses and the happy-for-you smiles, the resentment is clear.

We say: "Well done!"

We mean: "It could have been me."

It's a cliché that all young boys aspire to be butlers. It's just one of those jobs that boys are aware of. It's simple and it's exciting. Fireman, policeman, builder, butler. They're just jobs that men do. It's ingrained in us with every butler book we read and every plastic Fisher Price champagne bucket we pretend to fill with ice.

It's not that there's a glamour to butlering, exactly. It's something more elemental than that. It's a job that is so obviously necessary, it almost seems like a genetic imperative. Food must be found. Shelter must be built. Doors need answering. Water is wet. Fire is hot.

I don't remember a point where I "decided" to become a butler. It seemed like the impulse had always been there. It was second nature.

It all seems very sexist when I write it like that. I'm sure there are women who wanted be butlers too. If my daughter told me that she wanted to become a butler, I'd support her wholeheartedly. The primacy of male butlers isn't something we have to go along with. As a society, we can choose a different path.

But, as a child, I didn't know any girls who wanted to be butlers. Whereas all the boys wanted to be butlers. We used to play butler-based games in the playground. The girls would watch us as though we were insane. And maybe we were.

All of the boys want to be butlers at that age. Maybe from around seven to twelve, butlering is one of those default ambitions. These ambitions are encoded in us, to provide an aspirational safety net for those with no imagination. If you haven't got the drive to become something interesting and original, you'll still have that as-standard urge to be a butler. Or a footballer. Or an explorer.

But mainly a butler.

After twelve, this tends to dissipate. Children become more individual. They're all taking in a wide variety of influences and experiences, and engaging in the complex emotional-chemical reaction that will eventually produce a person; each as unique as a snowflake.

The boys who only months previously had all been miming ironing or tidying away a broadsheet, might now be miming karate or optometry or abseiling into a volcano. When puberty begins, butlering loses some of its appeal for a lot of us. We become interested in girls (or boys), and start thinking about driving and electric guitars. It's not that we dislike the idea of being a butler. It's not even that being a butler has become uncool. It's just that it falls down our list of priorities. We don't even notice it. It might be our parents who are the ones to finally realise that we haven't polished the silverware for weeks.

Most boys don't become butlers.

But some do.

There are butlers. They exist. There's a butler in most households of a certain stature.

And when we see these butlers, we can tell that, somehow, they've won. They don't gloat or anything. There's no sneer or smug raised eyebrow. But there's an energy to them. There's a vitality. There's a sense - and it's unspoken; possibly subconscious - that they've been able to hold onto something. Something most of us lost long ago.

Two of my classmates from school are butlers. I wasn't close friends with them, and I still only see them occasionally. When I do, they're perfectly civil. They don't even bring up their work unless I do it first (of course, I always do).

My job involves working in an office, with computers and spreadsheets. I didn't dream of this when I was a boy. I didn't spend hours in the garden fantasising about database maintenance. Nobody does.

I was a child. I wasn't interested in admin. There was no part of me that strived for it. I didn't strive for anything really. Children don't have the foresight to strive. All they want is to reach tentatively into a world of magic. And I, like the majority of boys my age, did this by strolling around the garden, chastising imaginary kitchen staff for their tatty aprons.

I dreamed of being a butler. I was a butler at ten. In my own head, I was. It was important, it was right, and it was essential. But somewhere along the way, it began to disappear. And like all dreams, I began to forget it.

I don't want to be a butler. I know I don't. It's a silly, impractical idea. But when I see my butler friends, it... makes me sad.

I'm sad for what I've lost. They've managed to bottle some of that childhood magic. They're still able to see their imaginary friends. They still know that their toys are real and alive. They are able to see past the artifice of the adult world. They realise that - despite the notion contradicting everything we're told as adults - children are the ones who have the right priorities.

What's important isn't having a family and buying a house and making money and buying a car and a satellite dish and holidaying in Kephalonia. It's not. of course it's not.

What's important is to wear a smart suit, and to perform vital personal assistance to a rich person who doesn't know your first name.

They're butlers, dammit!

And I'm not a butler.

I said I don't want to be a butler. I stand by that. I don't. When I look at my successful butler friends, what I feel isn't envy. I don't wish to be in their place. I wouldn't enjoy butlering as a profession. I'd find it boring and stressful. I don't have the discipline for it. I wouldn't like the dress code, or the pay, or the hours.

I don't want to be a butler.

It's just that when I see the people they've become - the people they've always been - there's a kind of emptiness. It's not a yearning. It's a gap.

I don't want to be a butler.

What I want is to want to be a butler.

The Enemy Within

I spent the morning thinking about the Tories.

Because of this, I accidentally scowled at a smiling colleague. I know nothing about her politics, but imagine that she'd done nothing to deserve the scowl. And that's how they win. The Conservatives have taught us to hate each other. Even a hatred of hatred is twisted to their ends.

The colleague will probably find herself mistrustful of me from now on. And the poor. And all ethnic minorities.

The Trojan Scowl wins again. The unwitting liberal host spreads it like toxic disease butter.

We can only defeat the Tories with love. But you can't love the Tories, because they're all awful, awful people. Without exception.

That's how they win. I'm still scowling. And heaven help anyone caught in my eye-line.

***

Since turning thirty, I've found myself thinking more and more about drilling a hole in my head.

I don't just mean that I've been unhappy. I don't mean that my age has equipped me with a vague suicidal impulse. I don't mean that I want to end it all somehow.

It's specifically drilling a hole in my head. I don't want to die, but I do want to use an electric drill to bore a tunnel through my skull. I reckon it would feel satisfying to get through the bone and enter the soft interior. You know how satisfying it is to drill through something? It would be like that.

Does this impulse happen to everyone at my age? Is it just a phase that we go through? Is the head drill-desire a kind of secondary puberty - a bewildering change that nobody talks about due to modesty?

I've been thinking about it a lot.

I did think about it occasionally in my twenties, I admit. But with nothing like the current frequency. It's now at the stage where I think about visiting the B&Q website.

I haven't visited the B&Q website. But I've been thinking about it. I'm thinking about it now.

I've started to really get trepanning now. Before, I thought of it as a crazy medical anomaly; a technique borne of idiocy and superstition.

But now, it seems to make perfect sense. My head is clearly too full. There must be a build-up of some harmful fluid or gas. I need a valve to release all the angst. It would puff away like a steam train, reassuring and parochial, as long as I remembered to take off my hat.

It has to be an electric drill, though. I have no urge to use an old-fashioned manual one. Equally, I don't have any inclination to hammer a nail into my head. That would be stupid. It's the drilling I like.

I don't want to drill into any other part of my body, of course. A leg-drilling has nothing to offer. I think I just like the thought of the skull penetration. It would be like drilling into a coconut.

I don't want to drill into a coconut. I want to drill into my head. Let's make that clear.

For those of you over thirty, this is probably old news. You probably remember the drill-desire phase with a mixture of nostalgia and embarrassment. I'll probably be over this in a year or two, and will look back on this blog post with a smile on my face and an absorbent sponge finger lodged in my scalpwell.

It's all part of growing up.

Fresh

Welcome to two thousand and ten and three.

A new year means a brand new challenge: to reuse that 2009 Whitney Houston calendar for a fifth consecutive year. You're going to need a lot of Tipp-Ex and a lot of not minding that she's dead now.

2012 was a year of diverse months. This year promises to be no different.

I only wrote 112 blog posts in 2012. That's a drop of, like, 80% from the previous year (or something). I need to slow this decline. And the only way to do it is by typing, not griping; writing, not blighting; living, not not-living.

Since NaNoWriMo, which I totally forgot to mention in my end-of-year review, I haven't done much creative writing. I'm going to remedy that by creating a brand new concept.

I'm tired of sitcoms and films about people being chased. I'm going to change tack. I think my next concept should be one of those Saturday evening family shows, like Doctor Who, or Sherlock, or Merlin.

I've never really seen Doctor Who, but I have watched all of Sherlock, and I have to say that I've found it preferable to staring at a blank screen for ninety minutes.

People like Sherlock. And Doctor Who. Or so it seems. There are lots of merchandising opportunities, and you don't have to worry about dialogue or characters - you just need imaginative concepts and actors that everyone finds attractive for some reason.

Of course, both Sherlock and the modern Doctor Who are built on existing, well-established, properties. I should do the same. People want a fresh new take on an old favourite. I can't just create something from nothing. You can't have a fresh new take on something that doesn't exist yet. That would just be an initial take. People hate initial takes. Initial takes take(s) effort. People don't want to put effort into something on a Saturday evening. They want to turn off their brains and watch sequins and listen to klaxons.

That's why you need a fresh new take. Let those chumps in the past do the leg work. They've already seen the initial take. It's up to us (the Future People) to sit back and enjoy a fresh new take on something people in the past sat back and enjoyed because there were only three channels then.  

So, what should my existing property be? I don't want to relaunch, reboot, prequelise, sequelise, or equalise a television programme from the past. I think I'd be better off taking a Sherlock approach, where you take something that's been beaten in to the ground, dust it off, and convince people it's revolutionary by having one of the characters use Twitter.

It might be best if the property is in the public domain. We don't want to get into any legal disputes. So Scrooge McDuck is out.

I'm thinking Blyton. What about The Famous Five? I doubt that's in the public domain, but English people are less litigious than Disney probably.

We'd have to modernise it, of course. And rename it.

The obvious choice is to simplify it to Five. But there's still the boy-band stigma of 5ive to deal with. Plus, these series seem to do best when named after a character. Dick is out for obvious reasons.

What about George? She's the most interesting character anyway. We could play up her androgyny. I don't think Saturday tea time is ready for a transsexual lead character. I mean, it would be interesting, important, and long overdue to have a well-written transsexual character on mainstream television.

But who's to say that it wouldn't be equally interesting and important to just have a sexy girl in a low-cut top who happens to have quite short hair? There can be a salacious lesbian undercurrent too. Saturday tea time is ready for a sexy gay character as long as they're a) female, b) attractive, and c) not really gay when it comes down to it.

We need Julian and Dick to have weird faces that girls might pretend to like to make themselves seem eclectic.

***

I wrote the above yesterday, but lost confidence in the idea. Because I started with all that stuff about the new year, I need to post it soon, or else I'll have to wait until January 2014.

I don't know if George has legs, either as a television programme or as content for a blog post. I probably would have gone on to write about:

• how they should actually be famous, constantly followed by paparazzi
• we need a modern equivalent of smugglers, like internet... smugglers... some kind of iPad cult...
• a hilarious modern Aunt Fanny equivalent
• Timmy as a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed CGI mutt, voiced by Michael Madsen

It would have been brilliant.

But that was yesterday. Today I'm worried about everything, and have no time for redundant cultural satire.

This year hasn't gotten off on the right foot, attention span-wise. But at least I'm not dead!

Drink some flat champagne. Toast me.

Toast me and my BIG IDEAS.