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.

Daniel Kitson, The Hob

Daniel Kitson, the bearded bespectacled behemouth of British comedy, as close to a comic genius as we've got in this country, a real natural, a genuine funny-boned amusatron, is back in the room. He's been away for a couple of years, but now he's back, back with that effortless funny, you know, the kind that is just funny cos it's funny, it doesn't even have to be true, it could be untrue and it would still be funny, that's how funny it is. Funny.

He's back, he's been away, he says he got bored of comedy, he's started to hate it partly because it's like the new Carling or something, but mainly he says because it was too easy, it was as easy as taking a shit, he says, it just came out, so he veered off into theatre, and I don't want to just regurgitate his act so i'll just say that he says his theatre is like his comedy except slightly different but he says it in a joke. But right now he's doing £3 shows upstairs in a South London pub, trying out his stuff, working it out, for his big tour in the future, his big comeback, but the truth is he's not even really working it out really, because he already knows what out of his material is good and he's bored of it already. Instead what he's doing is he's just working out, getting into training, limbering up. He's not even doing the material he's going to do on the tour, he's just riffing. It's a bit of a comedy masterclass, a bit of one, he shows you the working out, the thought processes that go into the finished articles, and he's keeping it all as fresh as he can and if it starts to flag at any point he's got the comedy chops to draw it back up, at his leisure, so it's no risk, even for the crowd.

He's generous, our Daniel Kitson, to a fault. Two hours he does and by the end it's too much, who the hell wants to listen to someone for two hours? Seriously, no matter how funny, two hours listening to one person is straining at the limit, it wears you out, but you can't complain because it's only £3, so what if he does too much and you're gasping for a pint at the end.

Of course I couldn't help comparing him to Stewart Lee, obviously since he's also a generous comedian, and also because I saw him the other day, and I think I'm going to say that Daniel Kitson is funnier than Stewart Lee the way that, well, I was going to compare Daniel Kitson to Stevie Wonder in 1973, and Stewart Lee to maybe I dunno someone quite good, with a few hits under their belt, but not as accomplished, or perhaps not as natural as Stevie Wonder, um let's say the Commodores, but to be honest the comparison seems stupid now and I don't want to make it, but the truth is that I can't imagine Daniel Kitson ever doing some of the slightly laboured tactics that Stewart Lee was indulging in the other day, because Daniel Kitson could get comic material out of an empty bag of crisps and Stewart Lee, well maybe he can but he doesn't want to, that's what he'd have you believe, I suppose, that he's above the tragic business of making people laugh. Which I can understand. I can get that. Why would you want to make people laugh, just because you're a stand-up comic, sorry, just because you've been defined as a stand-up comic, actually that's just the capitalism talking, yeah right, that's just the fucking factory system putting us all into boxes, me into a sort of factory-worker box, office bunny box, you into a stand-up comic box but you're more than that, You're more than making people laugh, you're a visionary at the vanguard of making people laugh, You're pushing the boundaries of making people laugh and think and therefore you're fully prepared to come and do a let's call it a slow two hours, moaning about your life when actually you're taking home fucking loads of dosh for it.

Which is what Daniel Kitson, in his generous way, alluded to, the spectacular amounts of money that are getting earned by these comedians. Those people you think of as the pinnacle of overpaid, these comedians are up there with them. Even those not caning the TV panel show-arena-tour-DVD circuit, even if you're just doing 400 seaters for tenners, you're still taking home (according to the generous Daniel Kitson) three grand a night. Stewart Lee's tickets, just for the record, were £20. And he was doing 40 nights, in a 420 seater, so very plausibly, even at a conservative estimate he's taking home £5000 x 40, that makes fucking 200 grand for a couple of hours every couple of nights for a couple of months



And he don't even get accused of selling out.

The truth is he was flogging CDs in the booth after the show, so I suspect he's got some pretty heavy gambling debts or a smack habit or something. Well, if he has, maybe he should write a fucking joke about it.

Anyway, back to Daniel Kitson, he's a modern comedic marvel, he came on 15 minutes late, because he'd lost his comedy notebooks just an hour before in the West End and riffed on what had happened for about half-an-hour, you know funny as you fucking like about losing four months of notes, that is the definition of a modern comedic marvel, I mean that's what you're aiming at, really, you don't need material, you are just funny, and then anything you talk about is funny: that's the pinnacle, and Daniel Kitson's in that realm. Admittedly, he did lose me slightly after he'd explained how much money he's making, I guess because so much of stand-up comedy depends on the comedian being somehow a conduit for the crowd, somehow representing us, a funnier, more observant version of us perhaps, but a recognisable us. That's why it's helpful if the comedian's a bit flawed, a bit fat, or needing beer bottle glasses or got a stammer, because we're all like that, or at least we fear we are, and the comedian embodies that part of us, but the truth is once you're raking in £200,000 upwards, those kind of figures, you know, you're not really one of us, you're one of them. Which is what Daniel Kitson was saying.

But Daniel Kitson is a modern comedic marvel, and I know this because after I came out my head was zinging with ideas and stuff, things to say, I was dosed up on creative juice, partly maybe because after just sitting in the dark concentrating on someone else for that long your mind is like a wound-up jack in the box, ready to leap out in all directions the minute you can get a moment to yourself, but also because the best, most creative people in the world light up your brain circuits with their genius, they gift you their genius, and Daniel Kitson did that.

Stewart Lee, to be fair to the fat, sell out jokeless cunt, did also light up my circuits, after I came out of his show I wrote a joke that I later put on twitter and it got one retweet and I mean that in a good way. In actual fact I thought of another gag that was about Stewart Lee not liking people insulting him on twitter (which it turns out they don't do, or at least not nearly as much as they go "wow Stewart Lee's fucking brilliant I love him", but he doesn't read out those quotes because he's not big-headed) and it was to do with if I saw him in Stoke Newington, where he explained in the show that he mopes about a lot, miserable about how much money he's making doing something that he supposedly loves; so if I saw Stewart Lee in Stoke Newington I'd run up to him and say “Oi, Stewart Lee, you fat, miserable jokeless fucking sell out cunt, do you prefer it now with me yelling in your ear in the street, you know, like we used to do in the 1980s, or would you prefer that I went and squeezed my bile into 140 characters that you could quote in your show, would that be better?” And that was my material about Stewart Lee.

But this review is not about Stewart Lee, who I like, I think he's funny, which is why I'm nicking his schtick, this review is about Daniel Kitson, who also earns too much money, footballer money, and he's fucking a very funny fucking guy, you know, like Stewart Lee is, but funnier, and he has the added bonus of actually writing material, because he sort of thinks, at a guess, that that's what it is to be a stand-up comedian, which is what he sees himself doing.

Maybe I'm bitter, I mean I'm not above saying I'm bitter, you know I write this shit, I mean let's be frank, less fewer people are going to read this than could fit into the toilet of the upstairs of the pub where Daniel Kitson did his set tonight, you know, and why's that, because it's bitter ramblings or because as Daniel Kitson generously said, it's mostly down to luck (and making an effort, which I haven't done), and also possibly writing sentences that start and finish on roughly the same topic. You know the sort of thing: selling out. Which brings me to one last question, why isn't it called selling in, there's two kinds of selling out, being a sell out and having a sell out, and one of those two should be called selling in, I don't care which, but one of them, because selling out so often follows selling out that it's hard to know which comes first or, as it happens, what I'm on about.

Stewart Lee, Leicester Square Theatre

Everyone's a critic. This has been true for a long time. Probably the phrase originates, like everything else, with the Ancient Greeks; Sophocles or Euripides cursing on their way home after yet another bad night at the Dionysus Odeon. Certainly it stretches back a long way. But it has never been more true (if a true thing can become more true, I don't know, but assuming it can) than these days, with the combination of the internet providing instant gratifying exposure for every one of everyone's faultless and well-considered opinions and a marginally improved literacy among the general population, which means more people than ever have the capacity to etch their thoughts into posterity.

Stewart Lee knows a lot about how everyone is a critic. He's seen it at work (literally). He spends a fair portion of his generous show reading out, in his stately manner, stately or possibly just very slow manner, a string of comments garnered by googling his name. None, it is fair to say, are anything less than critical. Some, you might consider, seem to be verging more on the personal, but still they remain pretty much critical. Such is the effect of hearing the myriad complaints within these mini-critiques that I began to doubt if I should attempt a criticism of Mr Lee's show myself. It appears that all the angles have been covered. I, who hate more than anything the thought that I might be like someone else, feel obliged to not criticise Mr Lee at all. Which is perhaps what he was aiming at, in taking ownership of the comments (And actually I'd note that if you look him up on twitter, the vast majority of comments are complimentary). But, I'll go further, because I'll not criticise Mr Lee with negative criticism or with positive criticism. 

You see there are two kinds of critical. Most people seem to be under the impression (an interesting concept, to be under an impression; the way an ink pad is when you reink a rubber stamp) that there is only one kind: negative criticism. But of course there are two kinds: negative and positive criticism. But I am so concerned with not being like anybody else, I'm willing to forgo the whole god damn caboodle of criticism altogether; to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to avoid the possibility that I might come across like some of the people Mr Lee quoted. Not because they were stupid, however. No, it was the fact that they were so literate that terrified me. Because they had well-constructed sentences, that they obviously thought were clever and this reminded me of myself, and I made a vow never again to write a sentence that I thought was clever, for fear that it should end up being quoted by a scowling Mr Lee as evidence in his general case that the world is a complete load of cunt.

On the other hand, the temptation is to construct a such a perfect reduction of Mr Lee that on a future googling mission (because he collects criticisms, or rather negative criticisms, and quotes them often in his shows, and on his books, like someone used to in the 1980s, I forget who, I think Douglas Adams probably, and it's no irony, because so much of what Stewart Lee does comes straight from the 1980s) he might uncover it and use it in a future show, my internet nom de plume attached. Hero status! What joy could that bring!

Mr Lee does a two hour show. Generous. It's a rare comedian that offers a two-hour show, and then sits in the concession stand afterwards signing DVDs and books, probably trying to scrape the bus fare home, but Mr Lee does it. Two hours! Most comedians do an hour and maybe a bit more. No more than you can fit onto one side of a CD. OK, so he had a break, but still, two hours! Doug Stanhope, who I saw at the same theatre a year or two ago, did two hours, with a break, but in the break they kicked you out and brought in another load of punters for the second half, so my guess is it was exactly the same as the first half. Stewart Lee does two hours! Admittedly, however, if Stewart Lee was to subtract from those two hours his commentary on and deconstruction of his show as it unfolds, if he was to lose that, and possibly also lose the refrain about how he hasn't got any material because all he does is comedy gigs and look after a small child, if he lost all of that, his show could probably have fitted onto one side of a C90 tape; but that's who Stewart Lee is, isn't it. That is Stewart Lee, so that would be like saying if you took all the motherfuckers out of Richard Pryor's act. Which would be a stupid thing to do, and also, truth be told, wouldn't save you very much time anyway.

So Stewart Lee does two hours, a large portion of which is deconstructing his own act as he goes along. Now, Stewart Lee was today in the paper, the Irish Times to be exact (and it's a funny concept, isn't it, being in the paper, you know, as if there's a land far away called the paper and you can be in it once in a blue moon, where was he? Oh he was in the paper, oh yeah, did he have a good time? I went once, oh yeah did you see the great columns? it's a funny concept especially nowadays when almost no-one reads 'the paper' so being in 'the paper' really means I read it on the internet, but then saying Stewart Lee was on the internet this morning doesn't make much sense, unless you were talking about him googling himself in preparation for his show) anyway where was I, oh yes, so Stewart Lee was in the paper today, the Irish Times, saying how all these young comedians are stealing his schtick. He wants to be able to retire, or at least work another 20 years, off his schtick, but all these pesky kids are stealing his schtick and making it seem trite. So he's abandoned his schtick, but all he's got to replace it is this deconstructionism. But here's a problem: deconstructionism is just another gag.

That's the first problem. What's wrong with a gag? Well, gags are considered a low form of comedy nowadays. It used to just be puns that were beneath the pale for the sophisticated comedian, but if we're really truthful the whole idea of gags is a wretched business. The best comedians don't use gags: Richard Pryor never told a gag. Doug Stanhope doesn't tell gags. Louis CK doesn't tell gags. Nor Seinfeld. You might notice all these comedians are American. So did I. I think not telling gags is a more American thing. And the main problem with gags is that they're nickable. You can half-inch a gag. But you can't half-inch Richard Pryor's schtick. Because it would be ridiculous. Eddie Murphy tried, and even he sounded ridiculous. So the first thing is, if people are nicking your schtick, it means it's not really your schtick, it's just a gag, of some kind or another.

So deconstructionism is a gag. Even I, on the few occasions I've tried stand-up, have done it; a bit of self-reflection, commenting on how I'm doing, Brechtian analysis, if you want to be flash, mainly when a joke falls flat, or just generally to make up for the fact that even on a good day my material is whisper thin. Am I to be accused of stealing Mr Lee's deconstructionism schtick? I never did your honour. I hadn't realised that Mr Lee had invented deconstructionism, if it was anybody I thought it was Derrida, but no, apparently it was Mr Lee, because Mr Lee never copies anybody, everything he does is completely original in all things, and he doesn't tell gags either, because he's above that sort of thing.

But he does a lot of deconstructionism, because he hasn't got any material, but that's ok, because he says that! That's the great deconstruction gag, that you haven't got any material but that's ok because you come right out and say it. Leaving aside why you feel the need to do a 40-night run at the Leicester Square Theatre when you haven't got any material (and it can't be for the money, because Mr Lee spends a fair portion of his stage time, in fact some of the best bits in the show are when he curses other, lesser comedians, who prostitute their 'skills' in the low art of making TV shows, for money, the way that Mr Lee wouldn't ever do), leaving aside that point, let's just ask whether the deconstructionism gag is so hilarious and original (obviously original, or Mr Lee would never use it) that it requires to be drawn out at great length, well of course it is and does.

The problem for Mr Lee seems to be that kids have stolen his act, but he's too old and worn out and a dad now to think of anything new, and yet time marches on so he keeps going, and tries to sort of brazen it out by saying: "Look I've got nothing, I'm not lying to you, I'm not pretending" hoping perhaps that something will come to him that will raise this 40-night run out of the philosophical manger in which it was born. Because when he says the show's not really about nothing it's about "idealised notions of society and the idea of how do you get ideas for a show when you don’t have any experiences", what he really means is, I'm hoping a better idea comes along in the course of the show. Well he's over 20 nights in, and it hasn't yet.

On reflection, maybe if he brought in the stuff about the kids stealing his act, the really true stuff, not the pretend true stuff about how he hasn't got any material ("No, no, I really don't") when he secretly he thinks he might do ("idealised notions of society... ok, ok, I really haven't") then it might have brought a touch more freshness in the room. Although a 40-night run could wilt the most blooming of sets. But I'm not here to criticise Mr Lee. I certainly don't hate Mr Lee, like those other people seem to. I like him. He's funny. I'm a bit worried he's running out of material though.

Anyway, dragging this long and slow and tedious essay to its sad, unloved conclusion, it only remains for me to come clean. Because being as I'm called criticalbill, you know I couldn't renounce criticism, not really. Not truly. I'd rather renounce my name, as the Chinese say, when they are really not going to do something. But the reason I forwent criticism of Mr Lee is because of a story he alluded to from his childhood. Mr Lee mentions briefly that he was an orphan, who was then adopted and the reason I won't be horrible about him is because I happen to know that under the tubby, depressive, Morrissey/Phil Jupitus/Terry Christian/Gordon Brown-looking exterior, Stewart is as hard and mean and well-honed as his biological father, Bruce.

Waiting For Arsene

Vladimir: We'll hang ourselves tomorrow. Unless Arsene buys.
Estragon: And if he buys?
Vladimir: We'll be saved.


Estragon: We might try him with other names.
Vladimir: I'm afraid he's dying.
Estragon: It'd be amusing.
Vladimir: What'd be amusing?
Estragon: To try him with other names, one after the other. It'd pass the time. And we'd be bound to hit on the right one sooner or later.


Vladimir: Don't go yet.
Samir: I'm going.
Vladimir: What do you do when you fall far from help?
Samir: We wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On!
Vladimir: Before you go tell them to sing.
Samir: Who?
Vladimir: The fans.
Samir: To sing?
Vladimir: Yes. Or to think.


Vladimir: Let's wait and see what he says.
Estragon: Who?

Vladimir: Arsene.
Estragon: Good idea.
Vladimir: Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand.


Estragon: What exactly did we ask him for?
Vladimir: Oh ... Nothing very definite.
Estragon: A kind of player.
Vladimir: Precisely
Estragon: And what did he reply?
Vladimir: That he'd see.
Estragon: That he couldn't promise anything.
Vladimir: That he'd have to think it over.


Estragon: Nothing happens, nobody comes, everybody goes, it's awful!

Vladimir: Well? Shall we buy?
Estragon: Yes, let's buy.
They do not move

Happydom

Newspapers are abuzz today with news of a happiness gene, as researchers at LSE have found that people with two long versions of the gene 5-HTT were 17.3% more likely to say they were "very satisfied" with their life compared to those who had two short versions. People with one long version of the gene were 8.5% more likely to be "very satisfied".

As a person who probably has two dwarf versions of this gene, I obviously take an interest. But what occurs to me today is this means that there is obviously evolutionary advantage in being unhappy, in being dissatisfied with life, otherwise women would have long given short shrift to those men among us with pygmy-length happy genes and the whole human race would by now be living in a bubble of ecstatic contentment. The way people sometimes talk to me you'd think that misery was a dangerous weapon that could harm innocent children, but it seems that evolution thinks differently and in fact misery is a valuable tool in the human toolbox.

This asks questions about the value of the Gross National Happiness statistics that, in some form or other, we may be moving towards. I've always thought they were a good idea, in part to try and break the idea that money is the only or best means of valuing things. But if unhappiness and dissatisfaction is actually evolutionarily selected for, then a happy country may not actually be a happy country. Or, to put it in less obtuse terms, a happy country may not be as obviously a good thing as it might seem.

Late added extra: Does Depression Help Us Think Better?

Writer's schlock

Writing is a hard slog. I might write I don't know 14 words at a time before I need to get up, make a cup of tea, check the internet is still there, scratch my balls, maybe write five or six more words, check the internet is still still there, go and look at myself in the bathroom for a while, get a glass of water and a sandwich, then read the 20 words I've written for a bit and then go out, after checking that the internet is still there. It's a slog, certainly, roughly equivalent to dragging a pool of honey across Arizona. It's as easy and forthcoming as stapling your fingers to the table, or trying to peel paint off the wall. When I do write it's normally fine, the words come out fairly easily and that, but it's just that I don't actually write very much, and it's punctuated with constant stoppages of practically no value, a consequence of my having the discipline of a very tired elastic band.

I have probably had no discipline for writing since I left school or thereabouts, and became obsessed with the idea that life should be about enjoyment and not forcing yourself to do things, that thou should do what thou wilt and all that, even if doing what thou wilt amounts to watching the telly for sixteen hours a day or, more likely nowadays, trawling the far reaches of the internet like an astronomer looking for signs of intelligent life. In a novel by Aleister Crowley, where apparently the do what thou wilt thing comes from, a rich heroin addict discovers that his calling is to be an engineer, but he only discovers that after doing what thou wilt a lot has enabled him to forget what he thinks he is supposed to do and find what it is that he is truly called to do. Which is fine and all, but I found what I am truly called to do fucking years ago, and it's not going to pay the bills. Also, most of us have probably had the experience of being totally immersed in something we really love doing, but yet soon find that the reality of trying to get do that thing in the real world, for a living, has little to do with what we like about it, and more to do with how we can best position ourselves in the marketplace to take advantage of prevailing conditions, and all that jazz. So I'm not so keen on do what thou wilt any more, although it has given me some magnificent afternoons watching Jerry Springer in the pub in years gone by.

The upshot of this is that I'm trying to write a book, because that is my attempt to turn something I wilt, ie writing, or at least being a writer, if not actually physically writing stuff, into something else I wilt, which is having some money at some point in the next 40 years. (Yes I know that this is unlikely, even if I produce an opus, but bear with me.) So this book, it's very short, and not particularly long, there aren't many words and it doesn't make any sense, but it's a cracking read probably, and brilliant and I think you should buy it now, in advance of publication, to guarantee you a copy before the rush gets going, obviously if I wasn't to actually produce it I would probably have to say something about a refund but that's cool, my guess is that you are the sort of gracious person who doesn't feel the need to demand refunds for undelivered produce, or maybe think that asking for money is undignified, or are just happy it has gone to a good home. I realise that I have now descended into writing begging letters on my own blog, which can't be a good sign, but anything to keep from knuckling down and writing my book.

Wilderness Road

Back when I were a lad, in yon misty days of 1986, on, as I remember it, a dreary summer holiday somewhere in Dorset with my mum and dad and little sister, there were sitcom on t'telly called Wilderness Road. I didn't remember the title, I only found it out after trawling through the names of 1980s sitcoms looking for possible matches, during a very dull day at work. Written by Bob Goody, who didn't have anything to do with The Goodies, the show had two main characters, called Cage and Moon, a slovenly pair who spent their time between a dilapidated flat and a dilapidated boozer. I liked those names so much I stole the name Cage for a character in my as yet unwritten masterpiece, which I began not writing in 1989 and still think of fondly. The main thing I remember about Wilderness Road is that one of Cage or Moon was reading Joyce's Ulysses, the big black Penguin edition, which he used in order to get to sleep at night. "Before I've read a page, I've dropped off," he said, or words to that effect. I must have liked the show, since I think I modelled my habit of being a complete loser on the two protagonists, and I've also never read more than a page of Joyce's Ulysses. It clearly made an impression on me anyway.  Despite my patronage, however, Wilderness Road was somewhat of a flop. It never got past the first series, was never repeated and has never been released on DVD or shown on UKGold. No clips are up on youtube. No wikipedia page delineates every scene and plot-twist. Thanks to the internet's passion for nostalgia, I've relived almost every notable televisual moment of my youth, to limited benefit. This one, however, has escaped the net: Wilderness Road remains in the wilderness.

not on your telly

I noticed the other day that I had subconsciously restricted myself to only watching telly after 7pm, the way that some alcoholics control their drinking by only drinking after a certain time. Is watching the telly like an addiction? You start out only doing it for fun, watching only good programmes, enjoyably, but before you know it you've got hooked on the transport from dingy reality, and you're topping up on cheap supplies of dubious quality, before you end up telly on first thing, consumed with plotting ways to murder Jeremy Kyle.

Pushing the analogy a bit (who me?), there's also the same desire to up sticks and go and live in the country where your chosen drug is most abundant. As a youngster I daydreamed about going to stay in New York and just binging on their 358 channels all day. (This was in the days when we only had four, so by the time I actually got to New York, I'd got over that particular aegri somnia vana.) The only career direction I can remember having at school was a vague desire to be in a job that allowed me to watch the telly all day. And I managed to get a job like that quite soon after school, so it turns out that, despite appearances, my career is actually one of 100% achievement.

Nowadays I don't watch telly unless I'm feeling good about myself - which is rare - and so can withstand the combined assault of advertisers, airbrushes, arseholes ... In fact it's objectionable enough just giving your front room over to a parade of people with good jobs in telly, while I fester under my own cavalier approach to accomplishment. Drinking seems a much wiser choice.

Commentator commentry

When I was a kid I quite fancied being a football commentator. Like most idle fantasies of my childhood, I have no idea what the hell I was thinking, but my guess is that it was a way of being involved in the game long after it had become obvious I was never going to play the game. A those who can, do, those who can't, commentate, sort of thing. I at least never wanted to be a referee, which would be inexcusable, like wanting to be a policeman, a role for emotionally undernourished types. Having said that I once acted as the ref in a primary school game between my year and the year below and had a great time disallowing their goals for no legitimate reason whatsoever. Which, such was our collectively shaky understanding of the actual rules, they accepted without much fuss, .

At age about 9 my class made a book with all the rules of football in it. The offside rule was written up as "You are offside when you are in the other team's half", which even at that age most of us could see wasn't the whole picture. So it's not that boys are genetically programmed to understand the offside rule, it's just that we've generally been trying to get our heads around it for longer than girls, who in those days and at that age seemed to spend their whole time arranging coloured pens. Richard Keys and Andy Gray should probably remember that there was a time they didn't fully understand the rules of football - like for instance the rule about not chatting shit into an open mic - although alas they seem for the moment to have kept their places as the two smuggest men on the box.

Some people have been suggesting that as Ron Atkinson was sacked for being racist off-air, so these two leprechauns-of-culture should also take a long walk off a short plank. But Ron used the word 'nigger' and he's not a rapper, so he had to go. What will happen to Gray or Keys when they have to work with a female commentator? I'm hoping for spontaneous combustion.

How do you become a football commentator? Do you just become a commentator and then move up the ranks to football? Or do you somehow get into football and shuffle along the aisle until you get to commentating? Where are the jobs advertised? It's not as if you can study it at Loughborough. Where do they get new commentators from? Perhaps when you get dropped calls, or missed calls from strange numbers, it's the BBC, phoning round listening to people's answerphone messages and "hellos" in search of the perfect commentating voice.

Not that commentating is all it's cracked up to be. Can you really make a living as a commentator when there's not that many matches on anyway? Can a second tier commentator make enough money out of being on five minutes of MOTD highlights to be able to get by the rest of the week? What do they do the rest of the time? Bone up on football encyclopedias? Practice pronunciation skills and comment sprinting? And it must be quite tiring, the concentration of having to commentate, to be able to tell which player the ball's gone to in a blink of an eye, and with Colemanballs always on your shoulder. Myself, I think I'd prefer the commentator's mate's job, where you don't have to do much of the grunt work and only have to step in with football knowledge occasionally, most of which you can probably just make up.

Obviously recruitment is slow in the commentating business, what with there being not much staff turnover. Once you're in the commentary chair, you're set, it's the world's last ever job for life. But down the pecking order, you need to start thinking seriously about wacking some of your senior colleagues if you ever want to get the big games. Perhaps that's what the Graykeysgate leaker was thinking. Or, and this is my guess, they've both made such cunts of themselves over the years that everyone who works with them is gasping at the chance to turn them in.

What was I saying?

One of the worst things about having a failing short-term memory is that I struggle to remember my dreams. Short-term memory is a bitch like that, you wake up and you have a presumably slightly longer-term memory that you have something in your short-term memory to look up, but you go there and the pail is completely empty, and no amount of scouring the factory floor will turn up its lost contents. It's not that I don't have dreams, because I remember that I had them, but the contents of them has evaporated which it never used to and often does now.

The analogy I've got today is of a bucket on a hinge which fills with memory slop on a regular basis, and then tips over and empties onto one of several memory conveyor belts: either to long-term memory, or to consciousness, or just in the trash. Even in the trash, though, it is still findable, just that you might have to get your hands dirty with a lot of rubbish that you never thought you'd have to remember. But my bucket is obviously on the piss somewhat and just tips out at odd times, before it's full, and not onto one of the conveyor belts but just onto the floor, where the contents mingles with the spit and sawdust and gets swept up whenever my brain does housekeeping.

It is common to blame short-term memory loss on smoking weed, but although being stoned could make you forgetful, I never found it damaged my ability when I wasn't stoned, and my memory was fine long after I'd given up smoking weed regularly. I blame MDMA, with whom I had a passionate, short and ultimately doomed love affair when I was, to be honest, old enough to know better. Maybe it's deeply narcissistic to compare a love affair to taking drugs (and not particularly original), but if you consider that one of the effects of being in love is how the other person makes you feel, maybe you can see the join. We started going out, every now and then at first, and I thought 'you know what, I really like this' and we saw more of each other, but the relationship didn't live up to its early promise, and we got into some destructive patterns: seeing each other too much and then falling out, before making up passionately. There were some horrible arguments in the mornings. I started cheating on her with other drugs, we tried out threesomes to bring back the pep but it was over and now we hardly ever even see each other, and when we do, well occasionally it's nice but mostly I think: thank god we're finished. Not that I don't remember what I saw in her, but yeeeeugsshh. She's happy now anyway, as she should be after the court awarded her half the brain cells.

True Stories Told Live

It's a nice little idea, in an upstairs room of a pub, five people get up and each get 10 minutes to tell a true story to a bunch of strangers. Anyone can have a go, although the storytellers are all vetted by the organisers beforehand, and the monthly event in Chapel Market is already so popular you have to apply for your free ticket weeks in advance. Created by David Hepworth (who launched such magazines as Just Seventeen, Q, Empire, Heat) and hosted by Canadian actor Kerry Shale, the night can't help but lean towards the mediaocracy, despite being ostensibly an egalitarian affair. Mr Shale twice referenced a previous storyteller who'd been in the army in Iraq as evidence that this wasn't just another chance for Islington media folk to yawn at each other, but the show I saw included two novelists, an Australian stand-up and the agony aunt from Cosmo, so they've got more work to be doing on that front. They are apparently hoping for a wider range of storytellers, but in any case everyone was good, the crowd were keen and it was a nice way to spend the evening.

The agony aunt was Irma Kurtz, who had told me beforehand in that quite unabashed way of Americans that she was incredibly nervous, and then got up and was slick as anything. She told a well-crafted tale from her childhood that ended with the line "and ten years later I looked at the signature on the piece of paper she'd given me and it said: Mae West!" Author Anthony McGowan told a nicely grim tale from his Leeds upbringing about shooting a dog with a crossbow, and ending by saying that he always puts dogs in his stories, and now you know why. Last up was author and journalist Alex Preston, an Oxbridge type who got the crowd onside by being self-depreciating and then told a gap yah story that was even more privileged than I'd have pinned on him at my most prejudiced, but which abruptly ended on a close shave with death that was quite poignant, for a posh boy. And we reckon his brother was Preston out of Big Brother. So a real celeb, after all.

I signed up for it at the end of the night. Of course I did, I couldn't resist a crowd that size being forced to listen to me. But whereas at the start of the night I'd have happily got up and spieled it, after watching the show the shadow of "wanting to be good" started to rear its ugly head. I tried out a tale on my cycle home and found that after 15 minutes I still hadn't got to the event at the heart of the story, so, alas, I might have to practise after all.

My new blog wot I wrote

The great thing about tumblr blogs is that you can have millions of them, for every tiny little pocket of your existence that you want to reveal, in its own completely sterile blog environment. And so it is that I present a new blog of mine where I will be posting my long-awaited photomeisterwerk 42 Views of the Gherkin, which I have been doing for so long it is practically my life's work. The more cultured of you will realise that this is my attempt at a photographic version of Hokusai's 36 Views of Mount Fuji, but set in London. This less cultured will just I don't know try and guess where I took the photos from. The mediumly cultured will probably look at the attendant google map, which tells you. Those of you that are left may like the photos, or like the idea, or both, or neither, or all four.

Zen, BBC 1

Zen is a police drama set in Rome, starring Rufus Sewell as a suave police inspector, famous for his integrity. We know this because everyone he meets says "ah! you are famous for your integrity!" Based on the best-known of British crime writer Michael Dibdin's books, the show has two main gimmicks. The first is that Zen is the honest cop's name ‒ Aurelio Zen, in fact, and though you might think that was almost, I don't know, a Japanese name, Signor Zen tells everyone who asks that it's Venetian. Or possibly Phoenician, my ears are a bit suspect. The second gimmick is that, despite being set in Italy, everybody talks in English accents, and peculiar, geographically unanchored English accents to boot. This makes everything very strange for the first 20 minutes of each episode as your brain tries to reconcile the gorgeous sunshine and Roman architecture with the cadences of Midsomer Murders. But once you've got used to it ‒ I do it by imagining that I'm watching a show set in very southern England ‒ or at least forgotten about it, well then there's a creditable if slightly silly cop drama to enjoy filled with swish cars, swarthy crooks and Italian coffee.

Interestingly, the women actors are Italians, not British, which, according to this review, is because Andy Harries, the show's producer, thinks that "there's something distinctive about the Italian female form". I'll say there is. And don't we get to revel in it when one lady strips three times in the course of a two-minute interview with our hero, while he does the old Napoleon Solo avert-your-eyes routine. My girlfriend thinks the woman actors are Italian so that they remain exotic and other, while we identify with good old English Aurelio. Or Andy, to his mates. But by making Sewell, who remains pretty much in swoon-on mode the whole time, a divorcee who lives with his mum ‒ because he's Italian, not because he's a loser ‒ they aren't exactly alienating the Milfs in the crowd either.

The main advantage of setting the stories in Italy, apart from the women, is of course Italy's gargantuan corruption, which constantly threatens to derail Zen as he swans about, with impeccable integrity, solving things. This provides most of the sub-plots as the viewer tries to estimate which of the dodgy-looking types are corrupt and which are just plain criminal. The other advantages are that it's mostly sunny, something not to be sniffed at when making January telly, and that everyone gets to wear expensive suits and dine in fancy-looking gaffs and generally inhabit a fantasy exotic land that the viewer is less likely to spoil by knowing much about. It's called having your panecotta and eating it. With its fetish for Italiana, both real and imagined, Zen is essentially the TV equivalent of Waitrose. But I quite like Waitrose, on occasion. And I quite like Zen, although I'm not hoping for any great enlightenment from it.

Angry People in Local Newspapers

A blog that does what it says on the tin. APILN provides a fairly constant stream of photos snipped from local rags around the country (and increasingly from Australia) where the subject seems to have been asked by the photographer to grimace in such a way that their tragic tale is told across their brows. Because a picture tells a thousand stories and all that. And not always the story that was intended. I love this site, partly for the photos but mainly because, by selecting stories on the basis of the pic, it offers a skewed digest of the world of local papers, full of human interest, faceless bureaucracy, mean landlords, sad kids, hard-done-by OAPs, pickled onions and grimacing.

Idea of the century #1

For my first post of the new year and also, I notice, my 300th post at all, I've had an idea which should revolutionise medicine, disease and general doctoring stuff. OK you may have guessed that I haven't fully researched the field, but still I reckon I'm on to a cast-iron gold-standard silver-plated FA cup of an idea. The sort of idea that immortalised the greats like Mendel (of the Royal Fireworks fame), and Darwin. Yes I've compared myself to Darwin, because I've had a brainwave, a wave of brain so profound it will wash into the rancid fjords of our immature and wasteful society, drown the ne'erdowells who have up to now gripped science and medicine in their talons, drown them in my brain-tsunami, and wash them down and give them a thorough cleansing and so on. I know it needs work: obviously genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, but I figure that the perspiration is the bit other people can do, and I'll get at least 1% of the Nobel Prize. So without further ado: My brilliant idea, which came to me as I lay in bed, or possibly in a dream, whichever sounds better and gains me further accolade. (Drum roll & horn vamp goes here)

A contagious vaccine

Yes! That's it. How come no-one's ever thought of that before? A vaccine which is contagious, so you give it to one person and they infect the rest of society with their immunity. In short order everyone is immune and disease turns around and just fucking gives the fuck up. We all live forever in global happiness and hospitals are closed and turned into nature reserves or Kew Gardens style hothouses.

Think of the advantages: No more vaccinating your poor innocent baby and watching as they cry for six hours and hate you for the first time of what will now be many, many times; no more vaccinations at school and getting punched on the arm where you just had the BCG jab and it fucking hurting a fuck of a lot; no more MMR scares and autism and people refusing vaccines because of something they read in the Daily Mail, because the contagious vaccine will obey no newspaper readership barriers; and best of all no more diseases apart from the new ones obviously, but we can work on those.

I know some poo-poohers are going to suggest that 1) making a contagious vaccine is actually quite difficult and probably requires 100 years of cleverness combined and 2) might not be such a good idea what with contagion vectors and virus mutuation and all that palava, but fuck 'em, they've had a good go at it and look at the mess they've made so far, leaving poo all over the place. And anyway you've got to start from somewhere, and I think starting from here is better than not starting at all, which is what the poo-poohers are suggesting.

Other, more conspiratorially-minded poo-poohers may worry about setting a precedent for basically infecting the entire nation for the good of its own health. It could lead to some civil liberty issues. Perhaps some contagion can be spread that, for example, changes brain chemistry to prevent people from enjoying cocaine, or X-Factor or shopping on a credit card when you are already far too in debt, or all the other woes of modern society that we'd like to abolish. That does sound a little big brotherish, and totalitarian, but I'm confident we can trust science and that, and er, well let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

So there you have it. An idea which will transform society and save the world. Thank you for listening. I'll be signing autographs in the Nobel Prize winners section later.

Thank god they're in charge!

"Ireland stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking."

George Osborne, 2006      (via)

The secret of eternal life

You see how at the moment before death, your whole life flashes before your eyes? How long do you think that takes? You've got to imagine that every tiny memory, every single one, even or especially those that have for years meandered deep below the conscious surface, is suddenly replayed in glorious technicolour for one last hurrah. No doubt it's very helpful in getting closure, and is probably worth years in therapy - ah! that's what my mum and dad did to me when I was four that made me a neurotic wreck - and also maybe you find out where you left your bag with your passport in Amsterdam that time, and which of your so-called friends nicked your favourite jacket. But if every memory stashed in years of unfulfilled living suddenly gets its day in the sun, that must take some amount of time. I can see that the word "flash" might be relevant here, but so must "whole life", and therefore, speaking scientificially, it must take at least some amount of time to get through the memories of every last cup of tea, episode of Strictly Come Dancing and walk to the newsagent. So what happens when, as you reweave your way through your life's rich tapestry, like so many episodes of The Wire, you finally reach the denouement, the moment just before death when your whole life starts to flash before your eyes?  Do you have to relive that as well, in an endless recursive loop? Because if so maybe I've stumbled on the secret of eternal life. The impossibility of death in the mind of one having their life flash before their eyes on a continual loop. Or perhaps each time it goes round it gets shorter and more grainy, until finally the last embers of life turn to ash and you find out what the hell it was all about.