Holiday 2013 - Day One

I’m in Turkey. The country, not the supermodel.

But geography can’t stand in the way of a good blog post. It can’t stand in the way of a bad one either.

Don’t worry though. This won’t be one of those annoying holiday journals, full of sunny photos and descriptions of exotic meals. I hate those things.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone who willingly talks about their own holiday is a filthy scumbag. I don’t even want people to enjoy their holidays. But if they have to enjoy them, they should have the decency to hide that fact from everyone. Even if they’re directly asked how the holiday was, people should simply shrug and mutter something about mosquitoes.

When I see someone outlining the joys of their vacation, I feel sick. And as for people who post holiday snaps on Facebook? Vermin.

Worse than vermin. Liars. Lying vermin. It’s always an airbrushed, carefully edited selection. You never see photos of the corpses and cockroach vomit that comprise most foreign excursions. And to misrepresent travel like that does a disservice to Britain. If you chose the right pictures, even a weekend in Gosport can seem like a technicolour wonderland.

So it won’t be one of those. I’m not going to brag about the fun stuff I’ve been doing. If I mention an event and you think it sounds like fun, you’re wrong. It isn’t fun.

Nothing is fun. Holidays are always terrible, and this one is no exception.

Hmm.

I may have gone a bit too far in the other direction. I do want to avoid gloating, but I don’t want to go the other way and make it into a whiny confessional. I don’t want it to be disaster laden Watchdog misery porn.

It should be something in the middle. I’ll be even handed. I’ll give you the facts and you can make up your own mind. It will be like a David Attenborough nature documentary. Yes, there will be scenes of tremendous beauty. But there will also be brute facts of the natural world. Real life isn’t one or the other. It contains both heady highs and disturbing ant fungi.

I’ll start with the journey. I’ve just realised that I can write an entry for each day, boosting my post count. It will make me look prolific.

We got the plane from Gatwick, and we had a two-hour bus trip on either side of the flight. It was a long day.

At the airport, we saw professional know-it-all John Sessions sitting in Pret A Manger. It was probably the most middle class piece of celebrity spotting ever done. I’ve emailed the story to Heat magazine, but have yet to hear back.

The flight itself was four hours of being in the sky. We were flying at sunset, which I don’t think I’ve done before. We were travelling east, so the sunset was twice as fast. You can get things done more quickly if you work as a team.

The sinking sun made the evening look apocalyptic; big plumes of cloud like atomic candy floss. As night fell, the roads far beneath us glowed like rivers of lava. I ate some biscuits.

We were exhausted by the time we got on our connecting bus. We were told to put up the arm rests on the outside seats in case we were flung out at sharp corners. Lucy’s arm rest didn’t work, so I held on to her leg. I should consider seatbelt as a possible future career path.

We barrelled along the dark alien roads, hot and barely conscious. We passed strange signs in a language that seemed totally not English. It was as though we were in a different country.

We were discussing whether or not Turkey was in Europe. We hoped that it wasn’t, because it will sound more exotic when we tell people about it. But not you, dear blog reader. We know each other too well for me to invent minor geographical milestones. Except the time I went to Super Wales.

I’m pretty sure we drove past a shop called ‘Pedo’, but I don’t want to google it to check.

We arrived at our hotel at 2am and pretended to listen to what the receptionist said. Before being shown to our room, they stuck paper wrist bands on us. This was so we were identified as guests of the hotel, so we could get our free meals and wouldn’t wake up in a bath full of ice, sans kidneys.

I don’t like the wrist band. I don’t like wrist band as two words, even. How does the spell check feel about wristband?

It’s fine. I’ll use that from now on.

There’s something a bit demeaning about wearing it all the time. I don’t like being marked out. Wherever we go, people are judging us as clueless tourists. It’s true, of course. But I prefer the old-fashioned method of exposing my own ignorance through conversation and too much politeness.

The wristband makes me out as a member of a certain group. It’s oppressive. “Now I know what concentration camp tattoos must feel like,” thinks an appalling man who has nothing to do with me.

My first thought was actually the film The Running Man. Or is it just Running Man? I can’t check. The internet here goes in and out. That’s why I’m writing this in Word. You might find the font or formatting of this post unfamiliar. If so, it will give you your own flavour of exotic adventure. This is a reciprocal relationship. You’re feeling what I’m feeling, and I’m guessing what you’re feeling.

In Running Man, there’s a prison camp where the convicts wear explosive collars. If they leave the prison grounds, it detonates, and the wearer gets all blown up and that. I don’t think this wristband is explosive. But I have it on my left hand anyway, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

I keep wanting to take it off, but I can’t. It’s waterproof, so at least we can go swimming. But can we swim in acid? There’s plenty of time to find out.

We found our room, which is perfectly nice. I eventually got to sleep. Lucy didn’t.

That was our first day. It seems a bit negative, this post. I’ll grant you that.

But I’d like you to keep in mind a couple of things.

Firstly, we hadn’t yet seen the hotel or the grounds or the town. That was to come in the second day. So any negativity on my part comes from the inside of my head. You can’t blame Turkey for that.

Secondly, I’ve been re-reading Stewart Lee’s book here, and so I’m sure I’ve taken on certain elements of his writing style. He’s sarcastic and glib. I can’t imagine him writing a gushing holiday journal. Having said that, he does describe various interesting places he’s been on tour, interesting people he’s met, and life-changing experiences he’s encountered.

These are all explained through a veil of cynicism. But shining a torch on your life, even if it’s a critical torch, is still reprehensibly arrogant. Just because you’re glib, it doesn’t mean you’re not a dick. Just because your holiday journal is peppered with misery, doesn’t mean you’re not forcing strangers to read about it against their will.

It’s a lesson I have learned, and will continue to ignore. I need to keep this month’s post count up after all.

Reunion

It's just about my birthday and I'll cry if I want to. I'm my own man. Ain't no onion gonna tell me what to do!

It a fitting bout of nostalgia, we watched Grosse Point Blank. On VHS. In 4:3 aspect ratio. It provided a sense of vivid pseudo-time travel, akin to visiting a medieval fort, or drinking Tab Clear.

It's a great film, with lots of good dialogue and a not-that-annoying Minnie Driver. Two thumbs up. And some toes.

Although it is lots of fun, it makes me feel a bit sad, as it reminds me of my teenage years.

I by no means had a bad childhood. My family were extremely loving and supportive, and I never had anything traumatic happen to me. I really appreciate all the advantages I had (SNES, robot butler, sense of worth etc).

But my teenage years were quite lonely.

I think I suffered from going to a school where there didn't seem to be many people on my wavelength. Or any wavelength that is usually associated with humans. The culture and hobbies and attitudes of my peers tended to be things I was uninterested in, or incapable of understanding.

I think my sister escaped from it all by forming her own identity, and seeking out like-minded people.

I didn't do that. Partly because I was generally quite shy and awkward, and also because I assumed that if I found any fellow outsiders, they'd be like my sisters friends (which didn't appeal at the time!).

Of course, I probably couldn't have found similar people to me, as they would have similarly been staying in their bedrooms playing Resident Evil.

But I suppose that's the nerd's burden (or 'nurden'). You retreat into your interests in a search for companionship. And that's why they mean so much to you. They still mean a lot to me.

I found solace in video games and pro wrestling and comic books and sitcoms.

I was thinking that the things I felt a close connection to all seemed to be from the US. In my teenage years (around 15-17, anyway), I didn't seem to find any British culture that appealed to me. I don't know why that was.

Apart from Lee and Herring, I don't think there was any British comedy that seemed aimed at me. I watched Harry Enfield and Men Behaving Badly, but I was a bit outside their target demographic. It wasn't until Spaced and subsequent comedies from the same generation that I found what I was looking for in the UK.

Similarly with music, Ben Folds Five really felt like it was mine, moreso than the Britpop that all my cooler, stupider and less whiny friends were into.

The trouble with me being a geek was that I was (and still am) a bit too much of an optimist and a romantic to get through it all unscathed. A true geek is bitter and cynical, and carries him or herself through the loneliness of adolescence on a wave of self-righteous snobbery. And though I had a bit of that, I still wanted to fit in, and I still wanted to fall in love.

So I lived vicariously through those same films and TV shows. I wanted to be the hero in Grosse Point Blank, I started watching Dawson's Creek, I wanted to experience what I saw as the heartbreak and passion of an idyllic American high school life. Because I didn't have any of that drama in my life. I wanted to be a romantic hero, but never got written into the narrative of my own teenage struggles.

I started to fall in love with fictional girls. For some reason, I went through a period of falling for sarcastic, acid-tongued indie-chick characters. I loved Janeane Garofalo in The Larry Sanders Show, Minnie Drive's character Grosse Point Blank, the deadpan receptionist in Dr Katz. The latter was a cartoon character. That's an extra layer of inaccessibility that I didn't really need.

So, that's why watching the film made me sad. I don't really rue those days. I'm sure they made me into who I am now. But sometimes I feel sorry for my teenage self, because I know how much he yearned for an impossible romantic life, and wasn't destined to get it.

After all that build-up, when I finally got around to living life, I had to cram all my teenage experiences into the first few weeks of University. Which is probably why it was so chaotic and emotional, and why I was such a dick. Sorry.

I don't have any regrets, though. I like the geek mindset. I like having all those cultural artefacts that helped define me. And I've had a very happy adult life so far.

If I'd have been a popular and social teenager, I probably wouldn't be interested in The Fall, or Daniel Kitson. And I probably wouldn't be writing this blog.

Which would be a sad loss for all of us.

So, I've started this birthday with feelings of nostalgia for an old film, which is itself about nostalgia. A little bit self-indulgent, but it is my birthday after all.

Anyway, I like over-analysing things. If you take things apart and scrutinise them, it makes the whole seem that much more wondrous.

I'm 27, but I'm still romantic and optimistic and excited by the world. Which sounds like arrogance.

It is arrogance. But it's also a big compliment, and a big thank you, to my parents, which makes it a bit more palatable.

***

I'll do some more stupid jokes next time, eg:

What do you call a three-legged leopard?

Justine, the spotty tripod.

Wah wah wah

I haven't been posting very frequently lately, and I'm trying to work out why.

I feel tired. But I always feel tired - especially on a Tuesday morning - so I don't think that's the answer. I read some of my older entries and I seem to be a bit more serious about things. I wrote long essays on evolution and gender politics. I don't seem to be getting that worked up about things anymore. Or maybe I do get worked up, but my confidence wavers as I write and I start to worry that I'm being pretentious or preachy.

I'm also a bit paranoid about repeating myself. It's easy to write a Wacky List!™ or a surreal dialogue, but I want to do something new. So I suppose that's what this is: a whiny confessional.

Of course, it's by no means my first one of them.

Maybe it's just a summer lull. It's difficult to find anything to write about when it's all sunny outside. Writing something on a computer seems so artificial - the antithesis of natural creativity. I should probably buy a fountain pen. Or some clay. But sculpting at my desk would probably be a bit conspicuous. As it is, the good weather is evaporating any impetus I might have to review the film Synecdoche, New York (it was quite good), or recount my latest trip to the Co-Op to buy milk (6 pints).

I'm feeling a bit impatient with everything at the moment. It's difficult to fight off a tidal wave of apathy, especially when you can't be bothered to build a boat. It would be useful to have a holiday, but I had one quite recently. It seemed to do the trick at the time, but the positive effects were temporary.

Once again, I find myself hatching schemes, and plotting career changes. And once again, I'm reasonably sure that I'm not going to do anything about it.

I want to send a demo CD to a radio station. I briefly hosted a student radio show a couple of years ago (I'm sure I must have mentioned it before). It seems like the ideal job: short hours, room for creativity, and both BBC Radio Oxford and Jack FM are really close to my house! It would be great! But I can never seem to get around to putting anything together. I'd probably have to listen to the radio stations to see what they're like. And that sounds unpleasant.

I used to write these kinds of adolescent moaning posts quite a lot when I started this blog. In a way, it's refreshing to be back! And I'm doing much better now than I was then. I have some irons in the fire, at least. Even if the fire is actually one of those joke birthday candles, and the iron is actually plastic. Yes, that metaphor makes lots of sense.

I'll have some coffee soon, which will probably perk me up. It won't make be any happier, or more awake, but it will make my tiredness a bit more intense. Like trying to improve a bad TV signal by turning up the contrast.

I don't actually feel unhappy or depressed. I feel fine. I'm just itching for something a little bit better - where I get to sleep later and have more time for incubating my schemes. Even though when they hatch, they'll probably be shrill and needy, and I'll end up getting less sleep than ever.