Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson; The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo review – waste knot

Bea Johnson and Marie Kondo

What do we do with all our rubbish? The waste of our lifestyles threatens to overwhelm us. As Andrew O'Hagan wrote in the LRB in 2007: "We grew up imagining that rubbish was taken away, only to find there is no such place as ‘away’." Rubbish tips overflow, the seas are awash with plastic trash and whole countries are turned into the dumping grounds of richer countries. OK, we recycle more, but recycling uses energy and often the thing made from the recycling is not itself recyclable, thus just kicking the can, bottle and packet one step down further the road before dumping it in landfill after all. Perhaps the answer is to produce less waste all together, recyclable or not.

Bea Johnson is described as the "priestess of waste-free living" on the cover of her curious book, first published in 2013 and now out in Penguin, which promotes the principle of zero-waste: putting nothing into landfill. The usual reduce, reuse and recycle mantra is here topped and tailed with refuse and rot. Of these refuse (verb not noun!) is the most pertinent, and the battle against accepting things into your home that will become rubbish is at the forefront.

The cover also includes the adage "Live Well, Consume Less, Feel Fabulous" on the back. Yes, this book is here to tell you waste-free living can make you happier, better off, your skin clearer, clear up your IBS, all while saving the world from swimming in its own filth. It's win-win, basically, and all you have to do is stop throwing stuff away, and you mainly do that by not accepting stuff that you will throw away in the first place. She's at war, essentially, with the disposability that we take for granted in modern life.

She is at pains to show that it's doable. She has come back from an extremist zero-waste lifestyle to a more manageable very-little-waste lifestyle, but has still got her waste-disposal needs down to one litre a year, which means if you throw out a two-pint bottle of milk, you've instantly out-wasted her.

It's an impressive feat, even if the entire book is shot through with a certain defensiveness whenever the terms "well-off, neurotic homemaker with too much time on her hands" hover above. Johnson is well-off, is a homemaker (housewife) and if she is neurotic, well, if only we could all channel our neurosis into internationally successful books. She's certainly thorough, although perhaps she's just enthusiastic.

I sort of liked it, even though I affect the same allergic reaction to lifestyle stuff that we all do. Johnson's style is all lifestyle, but the issue of waste is somewhat more pressing than the here-today-gone-tomorrow diets, exercise and skincare regimes that make up most of the lifestyle section. Waste is fascinating, to my mind: I seem to have a deep-seated, although largely unsatisfied, desire to feel that we and the things we use are in a ever-replenishing cycle, rather than on a one-way journey to the dump. 

Johnson does some wacky shit. Takes a plethora of containers to the bulk-buy supermarket in order to refuse any bags, boxes or packets that might imperil her one-litre-a-year habit. Makes her own cosmetics and deodorant. Mulches paper. Brushes her teeth with a twig. Refuses any and all freebies, even the shampoo packets in hotel bathrooms. The book itself is quite closely typeset, presumably an environmental choice to use less paper. Sometimes, following her thought processes can be nice, as she explains how she's ended up making this choice over that choice, or this compromise over that principle. But it can also be exhausting, although that could be from having to squint at the close-set type.

It's worth reading though, because even you don't subscribe to the whole zero-waste biz, the very fact that someone is bothering to consider the idea does begin to rub off on you. I started wondering whether I needed to take the wooden spoon with my takeaway cup of tea (let's not even get on to the takeaway cup itself), or the paper bag for my brownie. I became a bit more aware, a bit more conscious, of just exactly how much needless waste is generated in the course of a day, and, following Johnson's example, started to think that perhaps it is worth making even those microchanges, because after all, microchanges add up, eventually, to a macrochanges. Eventually.

So, I liked the book. It's absurd in parts, but not unbearable. She could have cut some of the liquid-soap recipes and instructions for building a dog-waste composter; it's not really a reference book, and those are the sort of things that are widely available on the web, but no matter. It's thorough and if a few of her ideas might sit well with you, we could, perhaps, eventually stop this world from turning entropically into a massive pile of slurried shite. 

At some points, Johnson mentions decluttering as a happy side effect of her zero-waste regime. In this she is very much stepping on the territory of Marie Kondo, the "queen of decluttering", who is currently having a moment and a half in the spotlight for her charmingly deranged method of de-stuffing our lives. Kondo's method is sort of the opposite of zero-waste – throwing things away is her jam. She tells you to go through all your possessions – in a very particular order – hold each one in your hand and decide if it "sparks joy" or not. If it doesn't, out it goes.

Kondo is very keen that we don't see throwing stuff away as shameful or wasteful. Fear of waste shouldn't mean we live our lives crammed with stuff we don't need and often don't even want or like. As a consultant, her clients have chucked away tonnes of stuff (she says, on average, 20-30 45-litre binbags, so 1,350 litres, or more than a millennium of Johnson's output), much of it straight into the garbage. 

It's not entirely clear to me how this method works once you move to the mundane items of daily life: can any of us truly say that our toothpaste "sparks joy"? Or our alarm clock. And if not, are we going to lob them out? "Sparking joy" here could perhaps mean having a positive reason to keep something, instead of negative reason for not getting rid of it. Kondo also goes in for a bit of animism: she wants you to think of your things as beings – something FWIW that my three-year-old is a dab hand at – and treat them with the respect they deserve – something that he is not so keen on. If you find something that you once loved but don't any more, you can thank it for its service and let it go, to the benefit of both you and it.

In contrast to Johnson's book, Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying is quite widely typeset – uncluttered – which makes it a more enjoyable read than Zero Waste Home, although it does use more paper per sentence. And whether not you can envisage thanking your old T-shirts for their service, or folding your underwear the way she recommends (no balling your socks, because they can't get any rest tucked up like that – that's what the lady says), there's something beautiful in the thinking behind her ideas. 

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose. To throw away what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a cupboard of drawer that you have forgotten its existence? If things had feelings, they would certainly not be happy. Free them from the prison to which you have relegated them. Help them to leave that deserted isle to which you have exiled them. Let them go, with gratitude. Not only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done tidying. 

One of the things Kondo gets across clearly is the waste of not throwing things away. We tend to see throwing things away as a loss, without recognising the cost of keeping them. But once she's painted a picture of a clutter-free lifestyle, where the things you have are things you've joyfully chosen, and, more importantly, where you can find them, because they're not surrounded by hundreds of other things you haven't, you'll consider swallowing your pride and wonder if you can't make time to follow her recommendations to energise your wardrobe.

Beyond a clear, tidy house, Kondo is aiming to train something more fundamental – the art of decision-making. By practising, first on clothes, then books, then papers, the miscellany, then sentimental items, you are honing your ability to use joy as a barometer for the things you want in your life. No prizes for guessing how this could leak out into the rest of your life. Moreover, she wants to help you see how your attachment to the past and anxiety to the future manifest in hoarding. It's tidying and psychoanalysis rolled into one. As long as no one tells her that when she throws all this stuff away, there is no away.

Star Wars The Force Awakens review – well, more a view than a review

Contains spoilers, I guess, but nothing too terrible. I wouldn't worry about it

To the cinema, then, just in time to see the great Force Awakens before everyone else has entirely forgotten about it. The last day of the Christmas holiday, after which we can stop looking back and start looking forward, to Episode 8 no doubt.

There's been a lot of kerfuffle and a whole lot of ker-ching over JJ Abrams' reboot, most of which I have entirely ignored in a vague attempt to A V O I D S P O I L E R S, that most 21st-century of afflictions (it didn't work, however: Twitter served up with several that did ruin the film, despite the fact they turned out not to be true). Thus I don't know where the general view has ascended to, beyond the obvious, which I shall now delineate to all our betterments.

Obvious fact #1: it's good

It's Star Wars. It looks the part. It fills the Star Wars-shaped gap in our grey matter. It does the job. The dialogue mostly makes sense. The characters are passable. There's a strict limit on the number of planetary systems with names made by sprinkling consonants into Egyptian words. There's whizz-bangs, lasers, lonely chaps in black masks, space ships, aliens, lightsabers, spiritual hokum, troubled families. Mostly, it looks the part. It's Star Wars. It's got the space junk thing. Everything looks battered and weathered, not slicked with a shiny veneer of CGI lotion. George Lucas's addiction to CGI was the tragedy that kept on giving, dragging the special editions and then the prequels out of the pock-marked, long time ago, far, far away galaxy and into a virtual-reality junket with no obvious boundary between the movie and the video game. 

Yadda yadda: It looks the part. It's got Han Solo and Chewie and the Millennium Falcon and X-wings and Tie fighters and stormtroopers and desert trading posts and ruined Imperial Destroyers lying in the sand, and sweet-beeping droids that are basically little dogs, and it's got cool, funky bars with wacky aliens playing cool, funky, wacky, alien reggae; it's got people picking things up from a long way away and telling other people to do things and them doing it; it's got the aforementioned bloke in black, only this time he takes off his mask and instead of a scarred Anakin Skywalker, it's some tortured teen who's stopped slapping on the Clearasil just long enough to act out his Oedipal issues.

It's got tree-lined vistas, sweeping desert-scapes, blowy snowy wastes, black galactic skies. It's got a planet that can blow up other planets – like last time, only much bigger and more powerful than that one, which you might remember was much bigger and more powerful than the one before that – and this planet has got a weak spot that the rebel ships can penetrate if only they get the shields down in time. It's Star Wars, basically, and Star Wars is good, so it's good. 

Obvious fact #2: you could complain

You could definitely complain. You could note that it's a bit tough to take the disjunction between where we left the story 33 years ago – the evil empire utterly vanquished, the furry ewoks dancing in the treetops, Darth Vader doing his best Uncle-Arthur-after-two-heart-attacks routine – and where we pick it up, with stormtroopers killing innocent villagers and the dark side back in the black. You could complain about any number of narrative nonsenses. You could complain about the lack of any relation to the world as it is now, our world, which has changed so much since 1977, a world in which small groups of dedicated fighters hiding out in desert enclaves while battling an apparently all-powerful enemy has acquired an entirely different meaning; also one where the hand dryers in the cinema toilets are now more advanced than half the ships in the original film. You could complain about the price of the tickets. You could complain that any boy who had Han Solo as his father would basically be the coolest kid in the universe, the one we'd all wanted to be, not Adrian Mole-goes-Isis. You could complain that a film supposedly about the battle of good and the light against the malign forces of the darkest sort of evil apparently includes a thank you to Darth Insidious himself, George Osborne, probably for giving the film-makers a huge tax break he had stolen from starving disabled children. 

But yeah, Star Wars, it was great. Two hours of intergalactic comic-strip cheeseburger and fries, an absorbing munch for the eyes, lacking key nutrients, sure, but pretty fuckin tasty. 

Doing Good Better by Will MacAskill – review

I don’t give to charity much. It’s not for want of a compassionate spirit. Some of my greatest anxieties over the years have been whether I’m a good or, more frequently, a bad person. I’m sometimes inspired by the desperation of disaster appeals to part with the odd £50, but having worked for charities, and knowing people who work for them, and knowing a little about them, I’ve become incredibly dubious about the value of giving to them.

Will MacAskill is a bright spark. He’s a research fellow in philosophy at Cambridge, and an associate professor in philosophy at Oxford, and from his photos he looks about 17, so I’m going for bright (which I think we save for people we’re trying to patronise) rather than ferociously clever, but you can take your own pick. His new book, Doing Good Better, is full of great new ways of thinking, surprising conclusions and helpful advice, and it has garnered great reviews from other ferociously bright Oxbridge graduates such as the Guardian's David Shariatmadari.

While Doing Good Better is ostensibly about how best to contribute to charity (branded nowadays as "effective altruism"), it is more widely about how to make decisions in general and in this way it fits neatly into the nascent Freakonomics genre – lo and behold, there is a gushing quote from Stephen Levitt on the cover – in which writers apply economic concepts to unusual topics, and which, spiced with a slug of maverick thinking and a certain amount of journalistic sleight-of-hand, have sold shedloads. (Incidentally, Freakonomics as a term, I’ve recently realised, only really works pronounced by an American rather than a Brit, for whom Dreckonomics might work better, or possibly Feckonomics.)

MacAskill's book is replete with interesting ideas and eyecatching (and liberal-baiting) heresies: Fairtrade is rubbish; sweatshops are good; carbon offsetting is more than just nonsensical greenwash; working in the City (and then donating a portion of your wages) can do more good than digging wells in Africa; going into politics could do anything good at all.

The most essential tenet with which MacAskill sets out his stall is that we should do as much good as possible with our donations. Some good is not enough; we must strive to do the most good we can do. He then moves on to a set of questions we can ask when judging whether a charity, or activity, or job is going to provide that “most good”. The question of whether we must strive to find the most good is already a vexed one, and although it sounds superficially a useful idea, it begins to betray the huge number of assumptions that MacAskill rolls into his calculations once he moves on to making assessments. (I find it interesting that an ambitious high flyer should be so set on “the most” or “the best”.) As Amia Srinivasan in the LRB alludes to, however, this impulse to do the most good takes on its own momentum: if we’re into doing the “most” good with our money, why stop at 10% or 15% or even 50% of our income. Why should we have luxuries, such as shoes or toast? Why do we need chairs, when there’s people dying out there? We can sit on the floor. Do we even need to sit down at all? (Late add: read this)

It’s when we come to MacAskill’s framework for making choices that we face our own choice of how much to accept. He has his five key questions on altruism: how many people benefit and by how much; is this the most effective thing you can do; is the area neglected; what would happen otherwise; what are the chances of success, and how much success would there be – and in answering them, the full battery of Freakonomic jargon comes out to play: a rinse and repeat cycle of Qalys (quality-adjusted life year), marginal utility, expected value, counterfactuals and a lot of putting numbers to things that you wouldn’t imagine at first glance (or indeed second or third) could have numbers put to them. Micromorts – where the risk of an activity killing you is turned into a value – get an airing; taking ecstasy is worth one micromort apparently, since the risk of dying is one in a million; climbing Mount Everest gets 13,000. There’s an almost hilarious attempt to judge how much money an MP could influence in a career.

This quantification of the difficult-to-quantify harks back to John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism, trying to assess the greatest good for the greatest number. Putting numbers on things does help us make sense of the world. And you can be sceptical about it without necessarily writing the whole thing off. The early scientists might have found the idea of putting a number on the speed something travels as impossible, even undesirable; I mean, how would you even begin to think about going about it? So it would be churlish to say out and out that trying to assess different medical programs or charitable endeavours by measuring or predicting their outputs is so fraught and filled with gross assumptions that the numbers you get at the end, while they might help you feel like you can make a decision, are closer to a fantasy than a predictive map.

Of course, in the real world, we do these kind of gross assumptions all the time, and it has to be better than other means of making these decisions: asking a priest or consulting runes or taking acid in a desert cave and waiting to see what the wall paintings tell us. But as MacAskill mentions when he’s talking about Fukushima nuclear disaster, and as we also saw in the subprime mortgage fiasco of 2007, small assumptions (in those cases, that a tiny chance of failure equalled zero, which is fine and dandy until it suddenly doesn’t) when rolled into other assumptions and cooked in a lovely Qaly-marginal utility-expected value stew, can turn out quite convincing but entirely wrong results.

The expected influence of an MP is a great example of how nebulous the calculations can get. MacAskill divides up British government spending into portions based on who he thinks influences where the money goes. At the end of this, he decides that an MP can influence £8m. Because he’s made a lot of conservative assumptions on the way, he feels pretty confident about this figure. But conservative or not, those assumptions carry a huge forward weight on them. A slight error in one has a dramatic effect on the end figure. And do backbench opposition MPs really think they influence £8m a year? Isn't there a huge variation between them that makes the number meaningless?

This sort of thing is what I call, in the manner of MacAskill and Freakonomics, the spiral of assumptions. From tiny assumptions, colossal mistakes are made. MacAskill’s so confident in his calculations that he even rolls how uncertain he is into them. But how certain is he about how uncertain he is? We’re into known knowns and unknown unknowns, and look how that worked out for Rumsfeld.

There’s something quite neoliberal in the assumptions MacAskill has made – not just when he tells people to get jobs in the City in order to donate their wages, quite forgetting, in his calculations, to take on board the possible damage that a career in the City could do to those you’re supposedly doing it in order to help (he has apparently subsequently addressed this). The two key assumptions underlying neoliberalism seem to be to be: the best marker of value is price, and the best decider of price is the market. It’s in the game of sticking numbers on things. Sticking numbers on things that are hard to quantify seems like a sensible enough thing to try – you can always adjust a value if you later find out you’ve got it wrong. But when it leads you to take for granted all sorts of things that are speculative at best – and at its worst, to screen out those things that you can’t jimmy up a value framework for – then you might find the results are not what you expected. You might even be doing bad.

I hesitate to get too up in MacAskill's grill – as Kant used to say – mainly because he is a philosophy don at both Ox and Bridge and I am, well, not. But there's a couple of points in which I feel he's on shaky ground. The first goes back to doing the most good, which automatically means doing good in places such as Ethiopia, where your money goes a lot further. But there's a lot to be said for proximity – giving to causes both close to your home and your heart – and giving in such a way that you can see the results. Charity begins at home, after all. And there's something curious about people who state in all confidence that they care no more for their family, or neighbours, than strangers across the ocean. Something not quite right.

The second point is slightly too dull to go into at length here, but is to do with carbon offsetting and whether preventing further rainforest destruction (as the charity he recommends does) can really count as offsetting your continuing carbon output (at a time when scientists are calling urgently for "negative emissions", preventing other further emissions while adding your own seems the quintessential "greenwash"). But whether or not it does – I don't think so – the charity he recommends, Cool Earth, sounds great, and definitely seems worth giving some of your money to.

Doing Good Better is filled with similarly great recommendations and ideas, but there's something awry in the ultra-rationality and seemingly arbitrary valuations. It's good, in other words, but he could have done better.

This just in: While I was attempting to construct this robust intellectual critique, I chanced upon a recent article by MacAskill, W and MacAskill, A (wife? sister?) that attempts to use the familial utilitarian-logic-and-reason method to show that lions shouldn’t be allowed to hunt wild animals. With its abundance of reason and surfeit of sense, it manages to come off as a sort of masterful Voltarian satire; the kind of thing, so they would teach you in philosophy class, after which utilitarianism was never heard of again.

Minds made up – a short story

The door opened and she came into the room. He was lying on the bed and worried immediately that he somehow looked undignified. As he tried to straighten himself out, a thought appeared in his head: “Oh, he looks sweet.” Not a thought of his, but he heard it all the same.

“Hey,” he said, “how are you?”

“I’m good,” she said, and she broke into a smile from the shyness.

He looked at her for a second and thought how beautiful she looked, and much he fancied her. Then he remembered himself. “Sit down,” he said, pointing at the chair. And then he heard in his head: “Rather sit on the bed.”

 He struggled to get his voice above a mumble. “Or ...” he said, nodding at the bed.

He cursed. He knew that when he was too shy, he might seem rude, or just retarded. But she took the hint, and sat on the bed, beside him. He wanted to touch her.

She looked at him, the edge of her lip caught between her teeth. Another strange thought crossed his mind, one that couldn’t possibly have been his: “He’s got lovely eyes.” They looked at each other for a minute. He suddenly had a crazy idea. “Can I hear her thoughts?” he asked himself. And without having looked away, they somehow found themselves looking at each other even more. He wanted to worship her skin, it was like a rich blanket he wanted to cuddle up to. He wanted to cuddle it and never get up again. She let go of her lip to smile broadly for a second, before a slight frown crossed her eyebrow. Then he heard another thought that wasn’t his: “A blanket?” And he thought: “How did she know what I was thinking?”

They both sat up. “Can you hear what I’m thinking?” they thought, their eyes lit with fear and awe.

Stoning – a short story

It was as he wiped his face before getting up to make a cup of tea that William noticed the dust falling from his forehead. He stared as it floated in the air, barely coaxed by gravity to the desk. After a moment of staring, realising his hand was still at his brow, William rubbed his eye and watched again as more microscopic grains joined the cloud. He sniffed, dragging some dust to his nose. It didn’t smell good.

He hadn’t been feeling well lately, William. Hadn’t had his usual zest. He was tired, always tired, and getting slow. Heavy. Walking had become an issue; where before he could have burst up a flight of stairs, or just jauntily strolled down a high street, now each step asked the question: do I have to?

A stroll had become a shuffle, and it wasn’t just his legs; his fingers were losing their panache. The keys on his computer were suddenly deeper than they had been. He plodded around the keyboard as if he was looking for a series of scattered possessions. He couldn't sort through his pockets, or count his crumpled cash. His breath was dense, his thoughts sluggish and mundane, his skin pallid and chalky. And now there was the dust.

He traced a cumbersome finger through the powder that had collected on the desk. Greyish dust, with a hint of blue, he fancied. Perhaps his skin was sloughing. But not flaking. Not flaking, but drowning, he thought. 

Maybe try the cup of tea, loosen up the joints. He wheezed himself out of the chair. His feet clubbed the ground as he walked to the water station, head throbbing with each step.

Two of his colleagues passed by, looking at him with trepidation, as if they were worried both about him, but also that if they asked, they might have to talk to him about it. They passed without acknowledgement, eyes straining at the ceiling. William tried to take a deep breath but his nose barely pinched at the air, and he continued, thudden-footed, towards his cup of tea.

At lunch, he went out to sit in the sun. He spent the entire hour on the grass, watching the wind in the trees, and barely moved a muscle the whole time. By the end of the hour, his skin was warmer, slightly, a surface improvement. But he was slower than ever. To lift up his head took the concentration of a crane operator. 

There was no point going back to the office, he decided, so he sat for a further three hours in the warmth, hoping it might improve things at least a little, but by the end of the afternoon, though his skin was warm to the touch, none of the heat had penetrated his muscles, which remained starched and stiff. He struggled back to the office to collect his things, and to tell them he’d not be in the next day. A day of rest, he decided. That was what was called for.

The morning sun cracked the curtains as William rested flat on his back on the bed. His thoughts were gummed up, his body lay fallow, static, somnolent. His mind chanced through options for anxiety. What kind of illness might this be, he wondered. What kind of cancer? What kind of life?  

Sitting up was manageable, if slow. His eyes barely wanted to move from looking straight ahead; they would move under his instruction, but only eventually, in their own time.

He went to the doctors' surgery. They told him to wait, which was the one thing that was easy, and he managed to sit there for three hours, without the time bothering him. In fact, he thought, it was more relaxing when he didn’t try to move. If he just stayed still, there wasn't really anything to worry about. He let out a breath at that thought, one that was barely able to leave his mouth.

The doctor listened to his complaint and examined him, sympathetic but hurried, before ruling out cancer as a cause, and suggesting some brisk walking, or yoga. But William knew brisk walking was out, and yoga had been unlikely at the best of times. He left the surgery and went to sit in the park again, where he watched litter gambol on the breeze, and his obdurate limbs soaked up what sunshine they could. 

He spent the day with his cares rolled up in a motionless daze, and by evening he again could feel the warmth on his skin. But the weight, the density of his body was unchanged. If anything it was even worse. His walk home was so lethargic he barely got back before dark.

As he lay back in bed, he could feel the warmth from his body reflected on his blanket. Perhaps I should take more notice of the sun, he thought.

The summer solstice was up. The man on the radio mentioned it, as William eyed the blue sky and wondered if he could go back to the park again. Ten thousand people expected at Stonehenge tonight, to welcome the solstice dawn, the radio man said. I’d like to welcome the dawn, thought William. That could help.

He took a train to Salisbury, and sat in his seat like a sack of sand. Then he took a bus. He approached the stones as evening fell, great crowds of students and hippies and costumed mystics converging for their vigil, carrying drums, blankets and liquor across the wide grass plain. The cheerful atmosphere passed him by, and the onset of cold at dusk had him worried. He entered the circle of stones, the ancient, cragged rocks towering above him. His back straightened and tightened, his head rolled in its place on top of his spine. His breaths tightened. He took a look at his skin, greyer, and bluer than before. 

By the stones, he felt better. The revellers' bodies gave him shelter, and at least the idea of warmth. He gently moved through the crowd until he found his spot, his feet resting on a dip in the ground. Beside him was one stone that was missing its pair. His feet felt secure here. His mind lifted. These stones were going to help him. 

The night passed briefly, easily. William didn’t move a single inch until the sunlight grew in the east, and the drumming grew harder, the shouting louder and the dancing wilder, and the light began to rise in the distance, and the sun breached the horizon, striking William’s sluggard mass, and he looked up, just, to see the sun one more time, before his eyes sunk into his head and his joints closed up, his feet dropped into the earth and he found his place amongst the stones.

And Stonehenge once again gave its solstice smile, this time with an extra tooth.

Vote goat – general election special

I live in a safe Labour seat. Very safe. They could put up a goat for election, a Satanist, Stalinist baby-eating, crack-smoking goat, and it would trot to victory without breaking a sweat. Labour has held this seat for so long the other parties are reduced to standing at the back dressed stupidly and looking stupid. It's so safe Fort Knox is on the phone, looking for tips. (Speaking of which, does anyone say "safe" any more? As in "Here's your ten-pound draw." "Safe, mate." I haven't said it for years, but then I haven't bought a ten-pound draw for years either, so maybe that's why.)

So anyway, I don't need to vote Labour in this election, because as I say, the whole goat thing, even though I hope to God's highest hopes that Red Ed gets in – HOPE TO FUCK – and not Cameron & his tribune of absolute cunts. But Labour are in round my way whatever I do, so I was going to vote Green, because you know, encourager les autres and all that.

But now, you see, with the whole Cameron claiming that getting the most votes counts in the legitimacy stakes – despite the whole parliamentary democracy thing – now I have a reason to vote Labour, to shore up their vote against such manifest shenanigans. But then again, my one little biddy vote doesn't count for much. But then again, what if other people think like me? So here's the thing:

I'm not positing any laws of spiritual causality here. I don't imagine what I choose to do will somehow influence anyone else. But I've noticed that I'm not an original thinker. I've noticed that when I think of a joke to tell on Twitter, someone else has thought of it; when I think of a comment to write under an Owen Jones CiF piece, someone else has already written it. In short, I'm one of a lot of thinkalikes. So, I have to conclude that whatever I decide to do viz this Labour/Green/Goat scenario, others will have also concluded it. Those of us bound together across space and time by our less-than-original minds will all vote the same way, so what I decide could count for a lot, or at least enough to wipe that smug cunt fuckwit leer off of Cameron's self-satisfied mug. That would get his goat. Vote goat.

With the birds

I'm on my way to work. It's raining, but the rain is so light it's unable to fall, and instead cavorts wildly in the twisting wind, my jacket collecting the drops like tiny fluff. There is a black man standing on the other side of Broad Lane, his hands held together as if performing a rite, a magpie sitting between them. The bird is in no rush to fly away. He pops it onto his shoulder and begins to languidly flap his arms like a bird of prey; then he jogs up and down the pavement, grinning wildly at the drivers in the lorries and cars going by. The bird trots behind his head to sit on his other shoulder, happy as Larry.

The New Yorker style guide – leaked

Got my hands on a copy of the New Yorker style guide, a top secret document whose arcane mysteries have baffled all but a very select few. The New Yorker has the greatest copyediting (subediting) department in the known universe. These are their sacred texts. Be careful reading, there's no guarantee you won't end up like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

General notes
In general, for style, grammar and spelling guidance, imagine it's 1823.

coöperate
Write coöperate with a diaeresis over the 2nd o. This shows there's a hyphen missing. No, I don't know why we don't just have a hyphen. If we didn't have the dots, people might think we didn't know how to spell cuperate.

cuperate There's no such word as cuperate.

diaeresis
Turns out the diaeresis in coöperate comes from Afrikaans. And New York used to be called New Amsterdam, OK?

Dutch
I was talking about the Dutch. Keep up. And it's not from Afrikaans, it's a pronunciation guide mark.

élite
With pronunciation guide mark. It's easy to spot the élite, as they are the type of person who write it like that.

hyperbole No pronunciation guide marks.

Internet Cap up. Because someone's got to. Also, just because we have given up and admitted the web exists, doesn't mean we won't stick a banner on the site that obscures four lines of text.

numbers
Write out all numbers in full. And then add some more letters. Yes, even dates. OK, not dates, but THAT'S IT FOR SLACKING. However, whenever you write a year in figures, add a couple of commas. As a sort of consolation.

pronunciation
Have you ever noticed that pronunciation isn't pronunciated the way it's written?

punctuation
All punctuation goes inside quote marks, even if it's from a different sentence.

teen-age
We must never, ever forget that these are two separate words

traveller
Words such as traveller and focussed have double consonants. Sometimes this is because that's how they are spelled.

writing to length If an article is going fine, and saying everything it needs to say and looks great, add 10,000 words to it.

Shogun assassin – a poem

When I was little,
my father was famous
He was the greatest samurai
in the Empire
He was the Shogun's decapitator.
He cut out the head of 131
lords for the Shogun
It was a bad time
for the Empire
The Shogun just stayed inside this
castle, and he never came out
People said his brain
was infected by devils
And that he was rotting with evil

The Shogun said his
people were not loyal
He said he had a lot of enemies,
but he killed more people than that
It was a bad time
Everybody living in fear
But still we were happy
My father would come home to mother,
and when he had seen her,
he would forget about the killings
He wasn't scared of the Shogun,
but the Shogun was scared of him

Husband ...
Maybe that was the problem
Azami
I had a bad dream
Don't be afraid
Bad dreams are only dreams
What a time you chose to be born,
Daigoro !

At night, mother
would sing for us
My father would go into the temple
and pray for peace
He prayed for things to get better
Then one night
The Shogun sent his
ninja spies to our house
They were supposed to kill my father
But they didn't
That was the night everything changed
For ever

Azami
Azami, your dream has come true!
Dai ... Daigoro
You must protect our son
They will pay
In rivers of blood

That was when my father
left his samurai life
and became a demon
He became an assassin
who walks on the road of vengeance
And he took me with him

I don't remember most of it myself
I only remember the Shogun's ninjas
hunting us wherever we go
And the bodies falling
And the blood

You are marching toward death
wherever you go,
you cannot escape the Shogun

My father hardly ever talks anymore
We just go a little farther everyday
At night, we make a fire,
have our tea
and we listen for the ninjas

We never make a sound

Sometimes he tells me about the past
and about mother
I try not to think about it
but my father can't
help it

Sometimes he gets lost
in the past

Le Tour at Loughton

I'm driving through Epping Forest. Up ahead the road is closed, parked cars nestled into the bank at the roadside. It's the Tour de France de England. I park up, half in the road. Probably won't get a ticket. Although you would in Hackney.

Stroll up to the barrier at the roundabout at the top of Golding's Hill. The crowd is one or two deep right round the road. A nonplussed crowd, patient. Nothing much going on. I ask a steward how long til the bikes get here.

"Two-thirty," he says. I look at my phone. It's 1.30.

The first five minutes drag. After they're over, I think well there's only 11 more of them to go. After 10 minutes I think well there's only five more of them to go.

Nothing is happening. A few cars drive by, dressed in decals advertising various French things: cars, TV stations, mineral water. A security car of some kind, growling French instructions via megaphone. I decide to wait it out. The quality of boredom is very different, less irritating, once I've decided to stay. A pantomime cow parades around the roundabout to muted applause. A police motorbike passes by. More cars, some with bike stands on the roof.

The crowd is a gentle variety, dressed in pastel shirts or horizontal stripes. Women have their shoulders out, the men have bald pates and bad postures. A few guys with racing bikes and the full cycle helmet/shirt/leggings combo; three of them in identical kits. Smattering of kids. I stare round at the thousand or so people in view. Not, so far as I can see, a single ethnic minority person, unless you count Italian.

A BMW goes by, middle-aged men wearing police baseball caps, waving heavily tattooed arms out the window. The crowd waves back.

A guy behind me has a tall tripod on which sits a small, odd-looking camera that could be out of the Terminator films. I ask him about it.

"It's a cine," he tells me. "Digital cine." He doesn't manage to explain how a digital cine differs from an ordinary video camera, beyond saying: "It doesn't take stills."

More cars go past. A yellow van with speakers on the roof blaring euro-pop swings by, two women dancing on makeshift podiums at the back. Another follows. A few minutes later two more arrive and pull up, French accents blaring out of the loudspeakers, offering fun bags for £20. The crowd, starved of entertainment, filters over to snap up the goodies, which turn out to be a yellow bag with a yellow t-shirt, a yellow cap and some other yellow tat. I ponder the offer, and decide against it.

After ten minutes two gendarmes on motorbikes pull up behind the van and tell them to get on with it. This must mean the riders are near. The gendarmes are in no rush though, and stay and take photos with the crowd. I look at my watch: 2.25. Just five minutes to go. A bloke in front of me says to his wife: "Another half hour, I reckon." The two yellow vans and the gendarmes drive off.

It starts to rain.

I've found myself a vantage point on a grassy knoll, slightly raised above the crowd, overlooking the roundabout. There is some talk as to whether the riders will take the far side of the roundabout or the near side. If they follow English road laws, they'll take the near side, but already many of the French cars have streamed by the opposite side. Spectators speculate as to what variables will influence the cyclists when they arrive, but everyone is agreed that no one knows. The cyclists will make a split-second decision, with no regard for the people who have stood out in the rain for more than an hour now.

A woman gives out leaflets advertising a working-from-home pyramid scheme of some sort, illustrated with pictures of people on holidays. I don't want to take one but somehow fall prey to her rapacious psychology. In revenge, I fold up and wrap the leaflet around my finger, so as to waste it.

I start to think about writing this blogpost. I need some observations to make it interesting, but looking at the crowd, I am bereft. I must be losing my observational nous. The crowd is le Essex ordinaire, quintessentially unremarkable. I feel that I should maybe go off and find something to report, but I don't.

Comedy bronze, however, comes to me, in the form of a man with two kids, a boy and a girl on his shoulders, who take up a position on the knoll. "Get ready to wave when they come," the dad says

"What?" she asks, with a beautiful Estuary twang. "Are we allowed to wave?"

More cars come by. A steadier stream than before, but still sporadic. A few with Skoda livery, and the slogan "le voiture officiale". Some passengers wave to the crowd. They wave back, enthusiastically. More police cars. The police seem to be doing the most waving, and beeping. The police motorbike has gone past five or six times, beeping. Or they could be different bikes each time.

"I can see a cow," says the girl, talking about the pantomime cow now chatting amongst the crowd. "You won't see a cow round here," asserts the dad. "There's a mascot one," the son says. "Black and white." "Oh, a black and white one, yeah," says the dad.

A guy with a paparrazi-looking camera arrives, lens as big as an arm. Later I see another guy with a lens as big as a leg.

A Sikh family arrive, a bloke and three daughters. They are the only ethnic minority people that I can see, along with a couple of Persian looking women who have stopped in front of me, but that is fine because I am raised on my grassy knoll, and they are short.

The main problem with viewing is that seemingly every second person has a camera.  Everyone is taking photos. The crowd is a sea of pastel shirts and arms holding cameras.

I imagine that when the riders get nearer we'll be able to hear the noise of the crowd, a discrete unit of noise that will start at the first rider and end after the last one; we'll be able to hear it moving, like a train, coming towards us, from over the hills. But, as time goes by, what we can mainly hear is helicopters. Three of them swoop, glide and hover above us. People strain with iPhones and point-and-shoots to get pics of them. One for the album, a blurry picture of a helicopter. Still the riders don't arrive. A couple of the helicopters go off, to where the action is. The crowd waves frenetically at the remaining helicopter. It doesn't appear to wave back.

A Team Sky car drives by, and everyone cheers it. British, you see. I check my phone: 3.15. The Sikh girls are bored and want to leave.

More cars are coming. A steady stream of cars, taking both sides of the roundabout. It does feel as if the riders are closing in. I listen for the crowd noise approaching, but there is just the rotor blades of the helicopters. Every now and then the crowd on the entrance to the roundabout start cheering and waving, but it is inevitably a police car or a Team Sky car, or a Vittel car, that they are yelling about.
And then motorbikes swoop in, more cars, and the crowd start waving some more, and someone says, they're here now, and the front two riders – Barta and Bideau, I now know – steam round the roundabout, on the far side. I let out an unconstrained woop, mostly cheering the end of the long wait. The two go about as fast as two guys cycling quickly, which seems obvious now, but seemed surprisingly slow at the time.

Some more cars and motorbikes. Then the peloton: who knows how many bikes, bunched like a flock of birds, split more or less 50/50 around the roundabout, a blur of cycle shirts and those flash bikes you see about the place. The Team Sky riders pass, all together, and get a good old British cheer. Everyone takes photos. And then it's done. Cars and motorbikes continue to pour down the road, but the cyclists have passed, and the crowd starts to peel away. I go quickly, to get my car out ahead of the rush. I chat to the paparazzo and ask if he got any good shots. He shows me one of some cyclists. It looks good. "I should have had a bigger lens," he says, probably thinking of the men with the leg lens.

When I get to my car, all of the cars parked ad hoc on the side of the road have a ticket on them. Even in Loughton the bastard traffic wardens are on it. But it's actually a flyer for the Ilford NHS treatment centre. Yeah, I don't know either.

Only perfection is permissible – a short story

"Come in, Mrs Simpson. Sit down. You remember me, I imagine, Mr Michaels."

She pulled out the chair and sat down. The office chair was set for someone much taller, and fatter, and there were an awkward few moments as she struggled to find the lever to adjust it.

"Thanks for coming in," Michaels said.

"Thanks for having me," she said, with a little rasp. He looked up suddenly from his papers, eyed her for a second, nodded and looked back down.

She looked round at the items on the table in front ofher: a blank pad of paper, a glass and jug of water, a set of headphones and a black wire that rose out of a hole in the table and ended in the centre of the table with a chunky adapter on the end. She poured a glass of water, trying in all her arm not to spill any. A little water flicked off the lip of the jug on to the table. She clasped the glass snugly and sipped it. That would get rid of the rasp.

"As you know, this is a very prestigious job, Mrs Simpson."

Mrs Simpson looked up from her glass at that. "Oh yes," she said quickly.

"However, with prestige comes requirements. Precision. Consistency."

She didn't say anything. She wanted him to think that she knew that already, which she did, sort of, and saying something would imply that she hadn't, which she hadn't, sort of. So saying nothing seemed the safest option.

The door opened and a young man entered, wearing a laboratory white coat, with plain trousers and even plainer shoes. He was carrying a wooden box, the size of a ream of A4 paper. He placed it carefully, steadily on the table, and withdrew his hands with a courtier's grace.

"You remember Raymond."

Raymond went over to a draw and produced a table-mount, a two plastic rings caged by a constellation of elastic that looked on the one hand like a crown and its reflection, and on the other, to Mrs Simpson, as Raymond placed it on the table, like a huge spider.

Then his hands returned to the box, he flicked open the latch, and his thumbs gently prised the lid up. The lid was hinged, and she caught a glimpse of the velvet lining as it lifted. The hush in the room became pronounced. Inside, the microphone gleamed like a rare jewel.

There was a moment then, when they were all sat there, staring at the box, when she felt that it was as if she was about to undergo heart replacement surgery, and that the microphone was her new heart, beating in its box, waiting to be fitted.

Raymond looked at Michaels for approval, and after a moment he gave it.

The microphone was brought out. It took two hands for Raymond to lift, and he cradled it in both palms, only moving it on to his fingers when it was ready to place on the stand. Then he lowered his hands with infinitesimal care, until the mic rested in its breeches, enthroned, and from its vantage began to glare down on Mrs Simpson, the iridescent maker's logo shining a imperial purple. Raymond connected the wire to the bottom of the microphone.

Do I kneel? she wondered. The thought was ridiculous, but yet, she thought, not impossible. The mic's bearing had a warrior's countenance, she thought, like a royal created not by blood, by birth, but by way of blood, by battle. She almost didn’t want to look at it. Raymond departed, a last short glance at the glimmer of the microphone. Then they were alone, Mrs Simpson, Michaels and the microphone.

Everything must go into there, she thought. Or perhaps she heard. It was a thought, but perhaps she heard the thought, rather than thinking it. Then it continued, in an ambiguous gully between thought and sound: Your entire being must go in there; into there, you must direct it all. She stared at the mesh crown of the microphone's head. Into there? she thought. Yes, into there.

She looked at Michaels, who was looking at her, watching her. And she watched him, but his lips didn’t moved, nor his eyes.

Direct it all, and by all, it must be all.

"So," Michaels said, cutting off the thought as though he couldn't hear it. "We must begin."

She tried a smile, but it was short, as if it couldn't escape the brow of her teeth. She sipped her water.

"Mrs Simpson," said Michaels, "you have been selected for this job because you are capable. You are the person who we believe can best accomplish our task. However, that does not mean you will accomplish it. It does not mean that you are incapable of failure. On the contrary," he said, his mouth punching out the words, "you will have to summon considerable powers to achieve this. Considerable powers. Nevertheless, we are all – myself, Raymond and Neumann – assured that you are capable, and we have the fullest faith in you."

She thought back to her interview in this same building, six weeks previously. Michaels and Raymond had both been there. She couldn't remember a Neumann.

The microphone stared out from its desk keep, and she thought suddenly of watching Lord of the Rings with her two boys, at home on Christmas day, the eye of Sauron staring back at them from the telly.

"I don't mean to make you anxious," Michaels said, the jump from silence to speaking making her exactly that. "However, you must understand that this is a precision industry. We are in the precision business. Only perfection is permissible. Perhaps," and here Michaels permitted himself a wave of the head, as if he was deviating slightly from a strict script, "you believe that perfection is impossible. And you would be right. Nevertheless, only perfection is permissible."

"OK," she said, sipping her water again. She wanted to say that this was all fine, that perfection being permissible was her everyday outlook; that she had done many jobs with that as a requirement, and it was nothing special. But she said nothing, glanced at the microphone and looked away.

"You must enunciate, of course, you must speak perfectly clearly, but more than that you must achieve an absence of personality, Mrs Simpson, a nothingness in which your perfect diction becomes the totality of existence. There must be no hint of history. No quirks of fate or hidden hands. All must be as it was in the advent of creation, and as it shall be at the final hurdle to armageddon."

Saying anything seemed beyond the point now, so she didn't say anything, and didn't even nod, but stared evenly at Michael, and then at the microphone, and then she took a sip of water, and then she looked away.

"Please remember, Mrs Simpson, when you speak, that you are speaking, in a theoretical possibility at least, to every man, woman and child on the planet. At some point, over the next 20 years, barring a planetary catastrophe, these words we are going to record are going to be heard by more people than had lived and died on the Earth for most of history. Your words will be heard by millions day in, day out, 364 days a year. No pop band, Mrs Simpson, will be heard by so many as you. No great politician's speech, or football commentator's peal. Your voice, Mrs Simpson, will conduct the great swathe of humanity through its wretched span, as polite, stern and familiar as each person's mother. Over and over again, your every nuance will be replayed. So there must be no nuance. There must be absolute equality in timbre, tone and pronunciation. There must be, Mrs Simpson, simply perfection."

"I understand," Mrs Simpson said, a little loudly, attempting to embody absolute equality in timbre, tone and pronunciation, but all she saw was the muscles in Michaels' face tighten momentarily, and then relax.

He took a small key and unlocked a drawer on his desk, and from it produced a thick file of papers. "Your script," he said, handing it over, with his right hand, far to the side of the imperious microphone.

She took it with her left, and placed it on the table as far from the mic as she could. She opened the file and read the first page. It was a list of places. Some of them she recognised – London landmarks like Tottenham Court Road, Drury Lane, The Old Vic – some she had never heard of – Spa Road, Anchor Street, Warndon Street.

"Now, if you would put your headphones on, we shall get a recording level."

She placed the huge headphones around her head, the clammy rubber clamping to her ears. From inside the headphones she could hear the room, the same room she had been sitting in, but drawn through the one mic, with its one ear, which made no distinction between the sound of her voice, the sound of her breath, the wheezing of Michaels’ chair, or the sound of dust settling on the desk.

"OK. Raymond," said Michaels, his voice booming in her ears. "We are ready to record." There was a short silence, and then Raymond's voice cut in. "Recording."

"To begin with," said Michael, putting on his pair of headphones, "could you tell me your name."

"Mrs Janet Simpson."

"And your place of birth?"

"London. University College Hospital."

"Is that OK, Raymond?"

"Good for levels."

"Everything OK?" said Michael. "Yes," came a faint reply. Not hers, and not Raymond's. Must be the mysterious Neumann, she thought.

"Mrs Simpson," said Michael. "Could you try reading the line at the top of the page."

She read it. "Number one," she said. "To."

"Stop there, thank you." There was a pause, as if Michaels was waiting for some kind of sign. But if there was one, she didn't see it. "Again, please," he said.

"Number one," she said. "To."

Michaels let out a faint sigh. It came from his nose, and was so faint that if it wasn't for the precision-engineered microphone clasping all sounds from the room with equal pull she would probably never have heard it.

"Again, please. Remember: be nothing."

The thought started up in her head: stare into the mic, it said. Just stare into the microphone. Let everything you give go into there. Your whole being. Your entirety. Let it go only there.

"Number one," she said. "To." And Michaels nodded, and sat back in his chair slightly.

"Now the list," he said. "From the top, one at a time."

"Tottenham Court Road," Mrs Simpson read. Michaels drew a breath, and looked at her. “Mrs Simpson, please. This is not a discotheque.”

Whatever can he mean, she wondered. Best not to listen to him too much, with his bizarre advice. The thought came to her: Read the name and then speak it, she thought. Yes, that's right, she thought. Read the name first, and then speak it. Don't read it and speak it together. She looked down the list, and then she turned her gaze to the mic, and stared into it.

"Tottenham Court Road," she said. "Drury Lane." Michaels gave a faint nod.

"Holburn Station," she read. "Aldwych / Kingsway."

"Stop," said Michael. "No, no, no.” There was a pause and she looked up at him for guidance. “It’s not you speaking, Mrs Simpson. Stop speaking. It’s not you who’s speaking." His grim face nodded towards the mic. She looked at it again.

“Holburn…”

“No!” Michaels nearly rose out of his seat. “No! Mrs Simpson, come on! You can’t fail Neumann like this!” And then he paused, and his body briefly clenched, as he was forcing himself to calm down. “Mrs Simpson, the bus passengers of London need you. Please. Try again.”

Wow, she thought. He’s a crazy one. Best to just look at the microphone. That was safest. And she stared at it, into the eye of the microphone, into the mesh cage, she stared so hard that she felt herself drawn in, felt herself move inside the cage, as if she wouldn't even need to speak, that the microphone could record her from within, as if they were one and the same.

"Lancaster Place."

Michaels relaxed in the chair, and the leather exhaled beneath him.

"Waterloo Bridge / South Bank."

"Waterloo Station / Tenison Way."

"The Old Vic."

In the kitchenette corner of the office that I sometimes find myself in

There is a coffee machine. It is made by a company called Westinghouse, who may be the same company that "provides fuel, services, technology, plant design and equipment for the commercial nuclear electric power industry", or it may not. On this coffee machine is a slogan: The ultimate coffee house experience.

I have, over the years, grown to love marketing's passion for mirrorworld, "say it and it's so" psychology. Or lying, as others might have it. This slogan is, needless to say, an out-an-out lie. The machine does not provide the ultimate anything. Not the ultimate coffee, nor the ultimate house, and the ultimate experience only in the same way that a filthy squat toilet at a French lorry stop might do.

Unless they mean by ultimate, "last ever", instead of "best ever". In which case, Westinghouse does provide at least my ultimate coffee machine experience.

age-old grief

I believed, when I was young,
that grieving wasn't for the one
who'd gone
but for the grieved

Not the grieved-for,
the one at rest,
but for the ones who were left

But now I'm old, when I die,
I hope you cry
For me

Regressive investigation

At a presentation on how to make TV programmes out of investigative journalism. The presenter wants to play us a recording of a phone conversation. He tries, but the big TV is showing the wrong input, and there are a few minutes while he and the office assistant fiddle with things to get his laptop screen showing. Finally they manage it, and he clicks the button on his laptop to play the video, which shows two people sitting around an identical laptop. One of them clicks the button on their laptop, and we watch them sitting there, listening to the muffled audio.

this sucks

I've often wondered if there's special training for women when their child has a baby, whether someone takes them aside in the hospital and says "psst, here are you'll need to know this" & then explains the mysteries of egg sucking ... or is it just something that happens naturally when the grandchild is born, a sort of evolutionary response that conveys the secret

Arsenal v Schalke

The Germans always bring a good crowd. I saw Dortmund play here last year, and their fans were the same as Schalke's - energetic, loud and uncannily well-drilled. It's almost as if the Germans are suckers for organisation. Someone conducts them, and they en masse do their thing. Waving their scarves en masse. Jumping up and down en masse. Going "Yo!" or the German equivalent en masse. And their singing goes on for ever. None of this twice round & out, quickly, for fear of being the last man singing; instead they repeat a refrain for ten minutes, the drummer leading them off and the effect is almost meditative.

Away fans are generally louder and better organised than the home mob, especially in Europe, where the evening kick off gives the visitors an entire day of travelling to get drunk in, whereas the hosts are mostly straight from work, a few pints on the way if they're lucky, and none at the ground. Of course some home fans - those in the lower leagues, or at the unfashionable end of the Premiership - are all about the roar. Portsmouth fans once so impressed Thierry Henry, as their team was crushed 5-0 at Fratton Park, that he gave them a special mention on the BBC. They were doing what the Germans were doing: singing throughout, though the Germans didn't have the decency to concede five.

It's something about supporting a team as opposed to watching them. If you support them, as a fan, you're energised in the cause, you're yelling and shouting and chanting because for a start your team dearly needs the help and also because even if you can't win - or especially if you can't win - on the pitch, at least on the terrace singing "your support is fucking shit" will stick one over your rival fans. But club success breeds a different fan, who doesn't so much support as expect, and when their expectations are dashed then they deride, and they're the ones paying £60 a match at Arsenal, the deriders. Sixty quid for a comfy seats and Wengertainment on the pitch. Wengertainment - which used to imply astonishing football and now implies astonishing shooting of your own foot - doesn't really lend itself to crowd passion, it inspires reverence, sitting back and absorbing, not yelling your head off in the hope your shout can somehow draw the ball goalwards.

But then Wengertainment's taken a lot of knocks over the last ten years, a steady sandpapering of a once flawless idol, and the buying of second-rate polish hasn't fooled anyone, not least the crowd, who booed at the final whistle, booed their own team's mediocre showing. I don't blame them booing, but it's hard to imagine that well-drilled German unit booing even if Arsenal had turned up and blasted Schalke off the park. Even if we do that back in Schalke, I imagine (I might be wrong) that the Germans would take too much pride in their own performance, the fans I mean, too much pride and dignity to be caught booing their own team. I mean that's the end then isn't it, you've lost, as a fan, when you boo your own team. You're not fulfilling the fan's role. You're booing them. You're not a supporter, you're something else. An expector, perhaps. Some might say - and I would sympathise with them - that their support comes in the form of sixty bloody quid a game - and here again the Germans stand out, with their ticket prices about what ours were when Wenger first arrived - so once you've supported the team, by keeping it afloat, you can bloody well let a bomb off in the stadium and it doesn't discount it and that's the football we've got ourselves.

The Highbury Library and the boo boys won't be solved by Arsenal winning stuff again, nor by them losing stuff again. Standing would help at least allow those inclined to choir to congregate together, but who knows where we can find the attitude of supporting, of cheering them on, instead of expecting, of booing them off.

The problem with this winning lark

I, like more or less everyone else who was unable to get out of London for the Olympics, have really been enjoying it, revelling in the fact that I was unable to get out of London and have been able to be part of the spectacle, which has mainly consisted of me watching it on telly and occasionally considering trying to buy a ticket. I've been hanging over the Wikipedia entries on Olympic cycling rules like a bad smell, hoping to just about understand the latest Omnium event before it finishes, and I have been regurgitating spurious info on the metal composition of the medals or the chemical composition of Victoria Pendleton’s underwear to passing motorists; in short I’ve been an Olympic cheerleader, although not an Olympic-standard cheerleader, but I’ve got down with the programme and shouted at the right times and generally tried to forget my last seven years of doomsaying and overall Olympic badmouthing that attentive readers may possibly recall.

And yet, and yet, something’s not right here, Stanley. Something’s just not A-OK. I don’t mean the panem et circuses element, which Andy Worthington alludes to here, nor the subjugation of athletic prowess to the myth of the State, which Mike Marqusee considers here; although I don’t know why not, because they’re both right and worth reading, and I speak as a great panum eater and circuses watcher; anyway I’m not really talking about the distracting of a crushed populace with illusionary visions of success and national unity while stealing the roofs over their heads stuff, I’m more talking about sport, competition and especially winning.

I’m not really one of nature’s winners – a whiner maybe – or at least I never win unless I absolutely have to, an attitude born largely of intense laziness, and also probably due to being well looked after as a youngster and as a result generally feeling safe and secure and complacent and spoilt. I do know how to win, in that I have occasionally stirred myself to victory over someone in something, or at least I imagine I have done, but generally winning is something to be looked down upon, a consolation for inadequate types, who can’t just be happy sitting in their underwear at 3 in the afternoon.

And much as I cheered Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis and the rest I am struck with unease at their celebrations and those of the crowd – what are they so blinking happy about? That they won? Why? Someone had to. It was them, this time. They’re like: all that hard work paid off, while next to them someone else who put in presumably an equal amount of hard work – or even more, in the case of Usain Bolt’s rivals – are going “I’m so sorry, I let everyone down, I’m so sad and useless” and if they lived in Imperial Japan would probably be expected to go and commit hari-kari right there and then and I’m left asking: Why? Why are you sad, why are you happy? “Because I won!” says the winner; “Because I lost!” says the loser. And I understand that, I do, I get it, but still I’m left thinking: So what? It’s a bit me, me, me isn’t it this winning lark? (While all of the crowd are going: it’s us, us, us!) And once you're about 13, aren't you expected to sort of get over it?

It’s strangely self-absorbed and the more I think about it the more unfathomable it seems. It’s not achieving the unachievable, breaking down barriers, climbing Everest or running under 4 minutes (and even most of these descended into races between frankly deranged individuals), it’s just being better than the other guy, whoever he is. It's the irrelevance of it that is so striking. It's just a game, just for sport. And you've only overcome another person; a person who on another day might have just as well beaten you. Of course I can understand the satisfaction of winning, and getting a 92.6% silver medal coated in gold for your pains, of completing a goal that has taken an entire life of dedication, robbed you of the pleasures of youth and which will bequest to you an old age of knacked knees, and yet, when all is packed up in the wheelie bin of life, what good is it if you have to have a loser beside you to make you a winner?

It goes in cycles – a short story

“Hold your fucking horses, bike boy.”

The cyclists crushed his brake handles in shock, crushed them so hard his tendons stung and he felt the imprint of the handles dig into his palms. The bike screeched to a stop, the back wheel rearing up behind him, and he wobbled on the spot, partly off balance, mostly out of fear.

Superman was stomping towards him, cape billowing, ground quivering, bright boots kicking through the thin puddles. No-one else was around. Hardly any windows, and only a few birds, overlooked the quiet side street. The cyclist wanted to look round, wanted to turn his head, but he was too frightened. His stomach wrung like a towel at each of Superman's approaching steps.

“Now tell me,” said the Man of Steel, when he was close enough that the cyclist could feel his breath rasping against his ear. “Do you know what a red light is for?”

The cyclist spoke, but said nothing, unable to muster the air to stir his vocal chords. He looked down at his bike, as if it was responsible; either for his dereliction or his feeble lungs. The bike in turn, as if equally ashamed, wobbled beneath him, then the front wheel twisted out, and it collapsed in a heap. The cyclist, still without looking at Superman, dropped his head a little more.

“Well?” asked the only surviving son of the planet of Krypton. “You know the rules of the road?”

“I do sir,” rasped the cyclist, finally, looking bolt ahead.

“And what are they for?” the costume-clad superhero spat, glad to have a response and not just be yelling at a mute.

“Stopping traffic.”

“Right. And you? Are you traffic?”

“I am sir.”

“You are traffic, yes indeed, you are. And tell me, did you stop at the red signal?”

“No sir,”  said the cyclist sadly.

“And why not?”

Superman’s breath was heating up now, and the cyclist wondered if it was going to singe the hairs on the back of his neck. 

“I don’t know sir.”

“You don’t know do you? That's a pretty pathetic answer, if you ask me.” The breath was hot. You could probably cook on that breath. It was like a bunsen burner.

That breath. A superhero's breath. That breath had been up the noses of some of the greatest master criminals of the modern day. It had blown in the faces of Presidents and Vice-Presidents, berated evil dictators and tantalised the necks of the world's most beautiful women. And now it scorched a cyclist's ear. How times had changed. The paparazzi had a lot to answer for, that was for sure. 

There was a pause, and it occurred to the cyclist that he should probably say something, some kind of entreaty, but he had no idea what that might be, and in any case it felt infinitely safer to just remain silent, as if things would only get worse if he spoke. But Superman didn’t speak either, and the cyclist began to worry now quite considerably that he was probably meant to say something, something clever or apologetic, or whatever it had to be, in order to stop the tireless fighter for peace, justice and the American way from drop-kicking him over a skyscraper, or bionically lobbing him into a special flat glass prison and Frisbee-throwing it into outerspace, or just delivering him to the police, arms bent back in a completely unnecessary and much too harshly applied full Nelson, because superheroes don’t know their own strength – I mean how can they – and they probably injure far more captives than they mean to, even when they don’t mean to.

The cyclist bit his lip. Still nothing occurred to him. Then Superman spoke again, only he was much quieter, and his voice echoed about the buildings.

“Hey you, pick up that litter!”

And the cyclist turned his head, saw Superman some fifty yards down the road, berating a middle-aged woman in ill-matched woollens. He picked up his bike and made off, pedals rattling beneath his shaking feet.

and the world remained silent

Wednesday's Times has an Olympic-related guide to the Most Arseachingly Pretentious Businesses in East London. As you might imagine, it’s a wide field. Contestants (with quotes from their websites or The Times) include

The Boundary Rooftop Restaurant
The space is replete with a large sail-like canopy, heating, festoon lighting and Welsh blankets

The Loft Project
The Loft Project is an experiment in food and people, set within an intimate and beautifully considered environment in East London

Loafing
We pride ourselves on our unique range of bespoke locally-sourced cakes

Crate Brewery & Pizzeria
Pizzas are to die for. Favourites include the sweet Middle Eastern Lamp with pinenuts and apricot or the sweet potato with Gorgonzola and walnuts

Ruby’s Basement Bar
Blackberry mojitos are served in original 1940s milk bottles

Twenty years on from being scared to walk down Kingsland High Road at night, I am now scared to walk down Kingsland High Road at any time.

cost of poverty

Brilliant (& tragic) bit of povo-writing from Memoirs of a Heroinhead on the highs and lows of the Argos catalogue. We also used to flick from page to page in a rush of desire & hope (but we were disciplined: you had to choose one thing from every page, no matter how much you didn't want ladies' jewellery or shaving products). However, our sojourns into the cottonworld citadel of Argos were soft play compared with this.