Torture Towers

The place Pankhi had begun referring to as 'Torture Towers' had finally closed for the day. The peacock eyed the wobbly line of survivors trudging beyond the courtyard's blue arch, a vast, upright herd filing away in twos and threes, all solemn and slump-shouldered. This in marked contrast to how they had arrived that same morning, with jaunty steps and a cheerful demeanour.

Pankhi had asked so many questions already that his neck was sore from looking up at the massive Shire. Nevertheless, he felt compelled to risk another. "Why?"

Stouthoof gave a brief toss of his mane, the equivalent of a shrug, Pankhi hoped, rather than impatience. "Mayhap they grieve for their kin. The ones who didn't make it."

The peacock twitched his crown in puzzlement, mindful that Stouthoof had been resident here long before all the noise, smoke and towering steel, in the days when animals roamed free within these sprawling grounds and the shabby ruin to their rear was a proud stately home.

"It’s just that I find their mournful stride and weary humour very much at odds," said Pankhi, at last.

"With what, pray?" queried the big steed, nuzzling at the greener shoots of grass growing by the peacock's side of the fence.

"Well, suppose you or I had emerged unscathed from such a trial of whirling leaps and death plunges, surviving being spun at high velocity and tethered to sky-bound projectiles all day. Would we depart so subdued at the climax, so crestfallen? I for one, should be cock-a-hoop with relief!"

The other's giant flank shivered, as though recoiling at the thought of such a thing. "A fair point," he conceded. "It is as though they've enjoyed their ordeal and now feel rueful at its conclusion."

"Exactly. And on that same point," Pankhi rejoined, "would we deem it necessary - be positively anxious in fact - to return, bright and early the following morning to repeat the experience? To sing, cheer and punch the air, sprinting gladly for our doom, as did this very throng at cock crow today?"

The old Shire chewed on his cud for a moment before replying, simply. "I fear we will never truly understand our twoleg overlords."

But Pankhi was determined to do exactly that. It might, after all, prove his only way out of here. "And what terrible crimes  must have they committed to merit this  vilest of punishments? Finally, what - for Goat's sake - is our part in the process? Judge? Jury? Executioner?"

"A host of theories and half-truths exist," Stouthoof ventured, "Some stranger than others."

A squeak of galoshes began sounding up the path. Pankhi joined the Shire's bowed head at the foot of his fence and pretended to forage for stray bits of grain. "Then I would gladly know more, and of these strange environs too." He lowered his thoughts to a murmur, concentrating them at the twitching ear of his confidant. "In return, and as reward for your patient schooling thus far, please feel free to avail yourself of the fruits of my pasture, such as it is."

The shire uprooted another hummock of succulent turf and gave a satisfied nicker. "Forsooth, the grass truly is greener, and more you shall hear, my friend. But fear not the eavesdropping of twolegs. Our languages are as distinct as ever. We trading wisdom head-to-head, as it were, and saving tongue-speech for battle and distress, while they remain closed-minded and wage their gibberish aloud."

"Perhaps it would be easier to countenance this whole sorry business, were it not so."

The Shire's broad face lifted, his creamy blaze accentuating limpid brown eyes. "A luxury, as ever, we regrettably lack. Discretion between ourselves is advisable, however," he went on. "Some here have suffered more than others, losing family and friends in the recent... difficulties. And if they would rebut the opinions of allies such as myself, they might take harder still against the words of a stranger."

Pankhi's interest was piqued, his mind suddenly racing with questions, but there was no further opportunity. The green-garbed stable hand had arrived to lead Stouthoof away and Pankhi now hastened to his own coop, anxious to avoid any more grasping hands, of which he had had quite enough for one day, perhaps even a lifetime.

Most of the other animals were now tucked up in their various abodes and already snoozing. Pankhi had not yet become accustomed to the sound of the giant mass of ironwork above his head, creaking as it cooled, nor the dying smell of the fuel that powered its occupant, a fearsome flame-red Dragon, ferrying an endless payload of screaming passengers to the bowels of the earth, dozens of times a day.

Pankhi realised, with a pang of misery and homesickness that this was to be  his life now, together with the other creatures, transported here from the tranquil greenery of their homes. He wondered how those who were born here stood it. Aside from the obvious and worrying 'difficulties' the old horse had referred to, though, what other cause was there for complaint? They were fed and groomed, kept largely safe from predators. And in return? Their only obligation, it seemed, was to be cooed at and stroked, occasionally blinded by lightning that sprang forth from a small box, carried usually in the hands of an older, taller twolegs.

Certainly there was risk of a sort. Small, cruel hands capable of inflicting casual malice. Tugging rather than petting, for example, unmindful of a creature's tender parts. But Pankhi had learned to squirm from such minor skirmishes, to weave and dodge, strutting for safety. Among such other tiny assailants were the pluckers and throttlers, of whom he had gleaned valuable advice from Gawain, the farm's red rooster in those first, bewildering days.

 "Yer plucker wants a trophy, see?" he warned. "And believe me, those 'andsome fevvers of yours’d make a fine one f'rem." The best way of foiling these miscreants, he said, was to "'ave a 'bolt'ole' in mind and make straight for it, sharpish like, the minute you feel one of those teeny-tiny mitts on your derriere."

"At least we've the run of the yard," Pankhi said. "I feel sorry for the pigs and goats confined to their pens, whether they've plumage to fret about or not."

 Gawain assured him they all tried to look out for each other, best they could. Worse than the plucker, though, he said, was the throttler. Not always bigger kids either. Some of the littlest ones had the fiercest tempers and the meatiest grips. "You 'ave to look for a certain gleam in their eye, a shiftiness they have about 'em. The kind of leer that smacks of malice aforethought."

And in those cases, and only those, mind, you should do whatever was necessary to survive, because it might literally be you or them, see. When such an encounter occurred, often in a cacophony of shrieks and a cloud of feathers, the other animals might be relied on to close ranks and make it difficult for the greengarbs to find a culprit from within the melee.

"A sharp biff to the boko with the old pecker should settle their hash," Gawaine confided, from atop his fence-post perch. "Or else use the claws that Goat gave you." Careful not to leave any marks, though, he'd cautioned. Those who did and were subsequently caught, whether in self-defence or not, got carted off to the brown shed apparently, sometimes never to be seen again.

Pankhi thanked his gaudier bedfellow, vowing that whatever help he was capable of, he would gladly provide.

"As a matter o'fact," sniffed the rooster. "I've a mind that big showy fan o'yorn - singularly useless in any other aspect - might be put to good use in such a situation, as a sort of feathery smokescreen, like. Which is why I reckon we should look arter one anuvver, fowl to fowl, in a manner o' speakin'."

Pankhi bobbed his sleek, turquoise head, dumbstruck for the moment at being lumped in the same genus as a common cockerel and quite appalled by the suggested misuse of his magnificent train. Before he could argue against this heavy cost of inclusion into the rooster's alliance, however, Gawain ploughed on, clearly having taken the peacock's mute series of nods as a vote of approval.

"Oh, there's one last type I forgot to mention. Worst of all in many respects."

"Worse than throttlers?" Pankhi said, already convinced he had been consigned to a special kind of hell.

"Because of 'ow innocent they seem," the Rooster crowed, pecking at the ground and making those darting, dabbing movements typical of his breed. "We call 'em the 'feeders'."

"Feeders?"

"It might well be somethin' scrummy lookin'," he blinked. "But if you want my advice, never give in to temptation, no matter 'ow 'ungry you might feel. Why, only last week this hen o'mine, Gertie, got herself all gummed up with some blob of stretchy goo she was slipped. Swears blind it was forced on her, but I'm not so sure. She gave in to temptation is my guess, and paid the price." He gestured toward the brown shed with a glint of rue.

"'Sides which, it ain't allowed. The greengarbs don't take kindly to it. You're just as likely to get carted off and poked and rattled till you cough it up. So - stand on me - it ain't worth the risk."

Pankhi settled down into his nest of shabby straw, his head still humming from the noise and heat of the day. Beyond the tall oaks that fringed the farm, an owl hooted. The animals wriggled and rustled in their own beds. With a last thought for his new comrades, and a prayer of remembrance for those they had come to replace, the peacock fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.

Now That's News.

 "I don't know that I want hard news," says Tim, his cursor hovering over the thumbnail of a mullah gesticulating outside a mosque. "Hard news is like hard porn. Tedious or messy There’s no middle ground."

I know what he means. Both involve a bombardment of grotesquerie we're depressed by and inured to, but can't quite bring ourselves to turn off. Something springs out of it we respond to. Some call to casual righteousness or insufficient rage. Nonetheless, this won’t be much of a lunchtime argument if I agree with everything he says.

“The news isn’t like porn.Porn is positive, at least in the sense that something gets delivered, even if it's only a half-pint of throat yogurt. News, on the other hand, is always negative. You don’t see ‘em talking about countryside clean-ups or respectful teenagers or pillars of the community spending their tax dollars on methane globes and solar energy."

I liquefy a parmesan shaving on my tongue, creaming the inside of my throat with Sicilian sea salt in three brisk swallows while he continues surfing, his mouse arrow a swirl of motion-blurred arcs.

"That’s cause it’s not interesting,” he concedes. “Has to be death all the time. Death, rape and politics."

"The big three,” I say. “The holy trinity."

"Champagne corks popping off-camera if they squeeze all three in." We’re off on a lunchtime riff. Freestyling. They don’t always get as spicy as this.

"Throw in a celebrity for the motherlode. It makes those anchormen and women hot.  The viagra of factual reporting. They can barely wait for the credits to finish. "

“That’s wish-fulfilment on your part.”

I prod a clutch of artichokes with a cheese straw, displacing oil. The modern newsdesk and its ungraspable woes. The constant reprisal of old crimes and disasters, as though their bones aren’t bleached enough, still harbouring shreds of meat under the settling dust. Especially those unresolved iniquities where the perpetrator somehow slipped the net. We have to make sense of things, of course. To understand how and why they happened and to prevent their recurrence. But of all crimes, the culpritless one requires most scrutiny. Larceny and outrage are powerful spurs. We need to know how exactly this showing of heels and shaken fists came about.  

He filches a queen olive from under my nose. “The internet isn’t the place for news, anyway.”

“Unlike porn, which is what you’d be glued to if not for the office firewall.”

He ignores me diligently, snapping off a single tine from a plastic fork for a toothpick. “For one thing, it lacks viewpoint. We don’t know how to feel.”

He’s right, damn it. The news is a static, recreatable feast and must be relayed in a certain way and in the correct environment, preferably on a big living room TV, where a familiar face delivers senselessness in a fierce but restrained voice. Like when judges rein themselves in to read out verdicts they don’t necessarily agree with, or your aunt telling you about the death of a favourite dog. It isn’t just the spoken word, we want to be told how to react by an expression we’d feel comfortable wearing ourselves.

“As a species, we can’t abide loose ends,” I observe, inserting a sun-dried tomato into my upper lip and mashing it against my teeth. “That’s why the same stories pop up time and again.”

He grunts in what I choose to understand is agreement, rolling the toothpick around his teeth like a poker player. “And all this ‘new evidence’ leading to fresh government enquiries, preferably requiring hotel subsistence and airline travel. Do they emerge, weeks later, creaking with fresh dossiers of evidence?”

“After filming countless re-enactments with slim-hipped men and dog-faced women?”

“After indulging in an orgy of note-taking and forensic dusting?”

“No,” I conclude, unnecessarily. There is a middling silence while we tackle the obduracy of cooked ham, respecting the etiquette of the shared platter in this aspect at least.

“For every unsolved Edinburgh slaying,” Tim declares thoughtfully to a flaccid scrap of prosciutto. “It has somehow become necessary to dig up a car park in Doncaster on a ‘hunch’.”

“For every Ponzi scheme hatched in Skipton seven years ago,” I add, with a mascarpone smile, “a fact-finding committee has to leave urgently tonight for the remote kingdom of Burundi to tie up ‘factual inconsistencies’.”

“And everything’s already happened that was worth talking about. Now it’s about reconstructions of defeat, regurgitating failure for early detection. Nobody cares any more, not even the victims.”

“Especially not the victims,” Tim agrees. “They just want to forget it, probably.”

I think about them, squeezed from their orbit, no different now than their antagonists and inhabiting the same dowdy realm. Dead, escaped, incarcerated, lost, roaming abroad, reconstituted, rehabilitated or spiritually elevated beyond judicial help. On whose authority do the newshounds and headline writers seek to prolong these events in our consciousnesses? Who decides what Pentecostal misery and sibilant grief we ought to reimagine? Should we crave the remembrance, in vivid detail, of how dead children died, or catch yet another parting glimpse of the lost millions we'll never see a penny of?

“It’s over,” I say. “Crime, felon and victim alike, gone to their separate destinies, unaffected by new light, fresh judgement or revised opinion. Jack the Ripper, Madeleine McCann, the Great Train Robbery, Hillsborough. Let it go."

“Let it go,” echoes Tim, clicking through a raft of links via Fox, the BBC and CNN.  “Find something good to say about litter-picking in Lowestoft for a change. Or a new species of deer in the Belgian Congo.”

I muse on this while sipping Irn Bru and leaning back in my chair. Everything in the news arises from the need to defer any kind of satisfaction with what unfolds in the moment. Everything that was already pure, arising of peculiar happenstance and crucially unknowable. It attempts to pin down our inexplicable miseries. If this one event hadn't taken place we would probably all be happy now, it suggests. If that thing were to happen again we’d be twice-betrayed, so we need to stay vigilant, not let the seductive present carry us to a grim and uncertain future. Despite this, I am playing devil’s advocate. It doesn’t do to let Tim think he’s right too often.

"You don't want to know what's going on in the world? How about chemical spills and forest fires?"

"They always happen in other countries, to other people. When did we last have a proper blaze or a tsunami? When was the last time you recognised a tattoo on the charred wrist sticking up from a crumpled sunroof, or a sooty-faced neighbour crying in their underwear at the roadside?”

I’d love to be able to take issue with this but can’t. “Never.”

“Exactly. Our News is crap, unless it’s about someone famous. Celebrity tax-dodgers, kiddy fiddlers, wife-beaters. Pier-end comedians, faking their own death. A trusted gameshow host snorting coke off the tits of an underage runaway. Now that’s worth a click.”

“What about factual stuff. Health and science and whatnot?”

“I don’t want to know that what I’ve been eating, drinking or rubbing into my balls for years suddenly causes cancer. Everything becomes bad for you that started on the upslope of healthy. Tune in to see what kills us today. Social media. Pickles. Foot lotion. No thanks.”

"Let me ask you this, then. How would you prefer to be entertained?"

"I’m glad you asked," he says, maximising another window. A video buffers and stutters, before successfully streaming footage, on the third refresh, of a dog driving a car. Brimming with confidence and undetectable energy, the Dalmation sends an SUV lurching up the road, while black men in white vests bump fists, venting a thorough and pixellated approval.

Tim snorts pesto onto the keyboard and scoops up the last bell pepper with a ragged wad of focaccia. “See now? That’s news!”

Kiss of Life

I died in a very interesting way. Gripping the manifest, I swang from the low bed of the wagon. It was only a few feet to the ground but my left knee gave way on landing. It had been dodgy ever since Corey Fenwick clattered it with a piece of drainpipe in Sunday school twenty years ago. Drainpipes were made of lead back then, so it would have packed quite a heft. I don't think there was a particular reason. Random violence was a common boredom-beater in those times.

So I leapt, when I should have known better. You get to an age where you have to accept a lack of invincibility, where things you used to manage with ease suddenly appear improbable. I couldn't know that for me the age would be thirty-five, but perhaps it had been on the cards ever since I tried to clear my driveway gates in a hurdler's leap and got my feet caught in two wrought-iron curlicues. That ended badly too, although nowhere near as badly as this.

I jumped. I don't know what it is with the jumping. I wasn't a hurdler, nor had I any ambition to be one. I just liked to jump, either over things or from on top of them. Height didn't seem to be a factor, nor circumstances (I once jumped from a hotel balcony in Albufeira, fortunately landing in the swimming pool and not some oily sunbather's lap.)

I just liked to jump, is all.

Actually, I jumped from this particular deck, because the driver of the truck it belonged to was a lady and I wanted to impress her. An Eastern European lady, attractive and wholly anomalous to the profession. It made a change. She wore a cheesecloth shirt, tied at the waist. It was summer, an even spread of sun and high, thinning cloud. She had long curls. Her hands looked strong and she smelled of light sweat and heavy tobacco. What I remember most was that she didn't need language to tell me to do all the work. Her lashes and lips were a universal translator.

So I landed and stumbled, feeling that gunshot pain in my knee. I tried to cushion it by squatting like a frog, and the biro in my top pocket, (a Bic biro - red, ironically) pierced my neck. It had a sharp, tapered top. An assassin couldn't have managed it better. It popped through my carotid and lodged itself in my windpipe. I can be thankful (one always looks for the positives) that exsanguination was marginally quicker than the choking. It still took a while, but those wide, shocked eyes and the Dubrovnik Marlboro kiss sustained me, and sustains me still.

The Idea of Ideas

That's me, the hidden assailant, springing out from nowhere, knife in hand. Throat-grabbing, reverse-thief, sidling up with a whisper. "Feel that? The steel of me? The gist of me? The nib-driven tip to draw a  bead of blood with?"

That's me, the spine-scraper, the eye-widener, the glimpse of a more thorough pain. "A wish is a promise," I say, glove-to-mouth. Yours alone to treadle on the whetstone of your mind with. To shape and hone till sparks fly from your eyes and feed the greedy forge. This blade, irreducibly fine, the keenest hum to drown out all the grinding, planar apathy of mankind.

Extrude from me a scimitar edge, and craft from that a jewelled hilt so I swish like a sword men feel honoured to fall on. Make me so much more than the crude shank that I was born of. Slice well, cut clean, let them yield to its point as meat on the skewer, as maidenheads violated, as shoals divided by native cunning. Use my lethality to make yourself prescient. Swash and buckle or flash hard for tiny nicks. I don't care, only don't squander me. I'm an idea. No-one need say 'what's the point?' I'm the point. Use me. Use it. Open a vein somewhere. Flay something's hide.

Or make of me a feather to tickle the unwary, make me a staff to herd sheep with. Herd and tickle till they beg 'no mas'. Preach and teach till their faces bleed and chalk dust hangs in their minds. I don't care, and neither am I selective; to tramp and poet akin, I'm just an idea, a wisp, an embodiment, a blueprint, a template, spelled from the ether by thoughts and words. I don't care for you, only that you don't squander me. I might not come this way again for a long time again. If ever.

Dust to Dust

Behind a Venetian blind, in the upper room of a high-ceilinged house, a woman moves. Nothing except her wrist and forearm are visible. The arm is bare and slender. Slim fingers wield a dusting cloth, like a pianist polishing their instrument prior to a long day of recital. She has better things to do, but this is a necessary prelude to them. A suggestion of jewellery; a bracelet or watch, in a loose cinch around the wrist.

He guesses that she cleans a vase or some unseen fixture. Her half-hiddenness gives her an air of mystique, though, and he clings to the idea that she is one of those housewives who clean in the nude. She is confident in the privacy of walls, and discards clothes whenever she can. He remembers the women at his old office talking about it, and finds it indescribably erotic to think of them, toiling in their underwear. Grunting and pink-faced, holding dustpan and brush, gussets stretched tight across the divide, thrown limbs dampening their cunts, their swollen tits jostling and straining beneath black lace or underwired satin.

It charges the moment with allure as he squints through the grimy windscreen, between lines of reflecting sunlight. Inching the car forward, he narrows distance and periphery, polarising her in the dark, hidden space she occupies. Once attuned, he searches for the deeper detail; giddy in the blatancy of his act. His mind is alert now, a clarity of focus one-pointed by the thrill of arousal and he knows, more than ever in that moment, that he is an unbelonging savage.

It isn't as though he is lurking under her window or stair, hoping for a flash of bare or covered crotch as she descends. His eye just happened to land on her. Besides, he remains unseen by angles of glazing and elevation, and in this way feels empowered, free to subsidise the tedium of queuing with idle speculation, for as long as the interlude lasts.

As though suddenly aware, the blind descends, severing the tenor of his fantastic thoughts. He feels obscurely cheated, as though she had teased him deliberately. The other hand has been holding the sash all along, only ever interested in completing the chore. Then the lights change, and the moment is lost as the traffic moves off like a herd, watchful and bustling.

The Pigeon of Life

You are a thing. Just a thing. A thing made of meat. I've come to tell you this. I am the Pigeon of Life. I roost in these places when the owner is away. Your owner is away. You are under the knife.

When you wake, the world wakes and everything is as it was. But the mind, for a time unknown, is strained through cloth, then set again to jelly. In that time, before waking, while you are liquid and steaming, the Pigeon of Life - me - comes and tells the story of how it is.

We'll have a talk. You'll say: "Why are you here? And if the owner is away, who am I?"

And I'll say: "You are the thing beneath the thing that thinks. The witness."

And then you'll say:  "Where is the owner?"

And I'll respond: "That's unimportant. We're here. That's important."

And then you'll find it fit to question: "Why a pigeon?"

And it'll be a stupid question. Because why a pigeon is irrelevant.  Why not a pigeon? Out of all the things I could have been, I'm a pigeon. What does that tell you? Everything and nothing. No thing. I'm nothing, and you're a thing. This is all just 'thingness'. I'm talking about things being as they are. Just as they are, not how you've made them. When you're in this state, with vapoured  blood and hands disgorging some impractical organ, there's a void. A place of nowhere. The owner can't know, can't feel. Can't care about it. You can suffer a pigeon, though, a timely bird of awakening. And this is practically the perfect moment. The only other time is death, I come to everybody then, but I'm not called the Pigeon of Death.

Then, while you are silent, I'll give you a choice. I'll say: "Put it this way: It's a pigeon or nothing. Your choice."

And you'll say: "I choose life."

"But you can't choose life," I'll say. "Only a pigeon. A pigeon or nothing. And you can't say 'I' either. You're not the chooser, you are not even the one who thinks. You are just a thing. A thing made of meat.

"I choose pigeon then." You might eventually concede.

And I'll say: "Good."

Because they don't always choose pigeon. Sometimes they settle for nothing, preferring to wait the endless wait, lurk dumbly in silence and then wake swearing nonsense. Except there's never ever complete silence, complete motionlessness, is there? Not really. Try and stop motion. Close your eyes. Go on.

"My eyes are closed," you could argue. "I'm asleep."

Not asleep: under. The dreamer is dreaming, unaware of itself. And while this happens, a pigeon can speak. Not just any pigeon, the Pigeon of Life.

Questions may come then. Questions like: "Have we met before?"

And the answer is: "No, but I know you and your soft, human anguish because you know you're going to die. The hundred different ways it colours your waking thoughts, how it makes a saboteur of your finest ambition, flavouring each second of your conscious life.

And then you'll whine and say: "Why tell me this?" Feeling more thoroughly miserable and alone than usual.

And I'll say: "I'm not here, not even talking. And if I am, let me say, it's for my own amusement. In a few minutes or a century you'll wake and remember nothing. No lingering bird, just the ache of a lost organ and a dryness of the eyes. A phantom pain, a phantom pigeon."

And you woke, talking nonsense, and the nurses laughed and the lamps glared dumbly from the surgeons' heads and the way their hands fluttered reminded you of wingbeats. And the strange thing was, you did remember. You thought everything was just as it was, but then you realised it wasn't.  Everything had been replaced with an exact replica of itself and you were just a thing. An interchangeable, scared, meat-made thing. 

Candleflame Jenkins

Aunt Lily was a puma and uncle Jack is a snake. I mean, Lily isn't much to look at now, what with the sunken cheeks and nicotine eyes, but back then - wow, she'd have devoured him in one bite, a midnight snack. All tooth and claw and velvet lashes. Pick her teeth with his backbone she would.

They say I see dead people, which isn't strictly true. I just see who they were before their parents were born. I can tell what you were before and what happened to you afterwards, assuming that you died of course, like uncle Jack did, all shrivelled up by spite and whisky.

Aunt Lily is still alive, though. Best thing she ever did was outlive him, and he pretty much reaps what he sowed, slithering round mangrove swamps with one eye on the clock and eels for breakfast.

Name's Jenkins. Jimmy 'Candleflame' Jenkins. Why candleflame? I can make a candle flame appear in your mind. Go on, you don't have to close your eyes or nothin'. Candle flame, about three feet in front. Am I right? Course I am!

Careful now, you might singe that lady's hair. I know, magic, right? Just pops out like a midnight torch bug.

So you might allow that knowing this stuff is a strange thing, but I'll let you into a secret. What I can't say with any kind of certainty is who we are now, and that's got to be even odder. Why, it's almost as though none of us exist, not in this ten-toed, lug-eared thinking form anyways.

The best I can put forward is that I think we might be angels. We might just be angels. Careful you never fall from God's grace, like uncle Jack. That's a cold toe in the water, right there.

You can let that flame go out now, it's nearly my stop. Wouldn't want you being a fire hazard without me here to douse you. Say, you look nice, and since you've put up with my old man prattling these last seventy miles, I'll let you into a secret. Yeah, another one. Seems like this is a two-for-one day.

I know what you're thinking; you want to know what you were, right, before you became an angel? I can tell you that. Then, we can go around the cemetery, looking at the gravestones, and I'll tell you what became of those people too. Come on, this is where we get off. Take my hand. Run.

The Catalyst Hero.

The Catalyst Hero.




Prompted by a discussion over on WayoftheRodent about the Die Hard movies.


Is John McClane a 'catalyst hero'? Not altering significantly himself, but acting as a catalyst for change in others? Even his reconciliation with Holly Gennero in the first one is more her forced re-appraisal of him rather than any redemptive transformation his ordeal has engendered. They still get progressively further apart as Mcclane reverts to type, till they are eventually divorced in the 4th movie.

Generally, a catalyst hero is the strongest reason for a film with a strong protagonist to generate successful sequels. You wouldn't expect Dances With Wolves 2 to grace your screen any time soon, for example. Kevin Costner had his journey, was reborn anew and brought his gift of knowledge back to the mundane world he left us behind in. We all walked away, wincing, the wiser. Not a catalyst hero, then, our lieutenant Dunbar. Similarly, Tom Hanks in 'Big'. These central characters tend to undergo their great journey, have their life-affirming experience and find themselves (and, concomitantly, us) changed by it forever. What's left to tell?

Indeed, (thinking aloud) take any bad sequel that does NOT involve a catalyst hero and maybe the reason they failed (discounting technical ineptitude) are that they:-

a) failed to expand on the main character or their journey in an original enough way

and/or

b) didn't find anything new to say about the hero or at least cause them to effect change in others

Matrix: Reloaded and Revolutions are good examples. Let's chuck Grease 2 in for good measure. Neo ran the whole gamut in the first one with some quasi-buddhist belt-and-braces brilliance. What was left to tell? The protagonist is changed forever and if he is not now a catalyst hero and no-one else is changing, all you've got left are action sequences and a message that has become repetitive - or worse - woolly and didactic to a sophisticated audience (i.e. practically everyone). Should these flagship 'journey' films always get remade then, rather than added to?

A catalyst hero has no such problem. Let's take some others and see how their follow-on potential flourishes, given that they themselves remain who they are while bestowing the opportunity for change on those they bump up against.

Eddie Murphy's character in Beverley Hills Cop - displaced from his ordinary world (just like Neo and Lt. John Dunbar) except here the two sidekicks in his new environment (Rosewood and Taggart) change most significantly, with the correspondingly smaller ripples spreading out from Foley's madcap splash. Sequels, it seems, are practically a no-brainer for the catalyst hero, probably because we ourselves ultimately fear change and cling to consistency. We know Axel will always be Axel as we know Indy will always be Indy, but we're happy to find out who or what they might cause change in next.

The Terminator series adds a twist to the concept of the catalyst hero. Emerging as enemy to John Conor in the first instance, then friend in the second. You could argue that the Terminator does himself change, but in a way that's arguably counter-intuitive to his silicon nature and certainly not entirely satisfying to audiences. We quickly find a voice for our misgiving, even if we don't know why it doesn't sit right. Well, here's why. The cyborg assassin shouldn't be having the human feelings he is credited with at the end of T2. It is a bit of screenwriting wish-fulfilment to tarnish his catalyst hero crown and give his inorganic innards an ineffable whiff of Hollywood meddling. We're not daft enough not to notice, even if we can't exactly explain what it is we're not seeing.

Other catalyst heroes? Ferris Bueller, undertaking his own great, but ultimately superficial journey. It is Cameron who changes most. Similarly, Marty McFly, perhaps one of the most potent catalyst heroes in the respect that practically everyone he comes into contact changes, albeit under the wonky auspices of Chaos Theory, where time is as much enemy as friend, and no outcome can be truly foreseen.

Catalysts come in all shapes and sizes, but they are, it seems, almost always profitable in terms of the sequel.

A Careful Life

I have crafted a careful life for myself; fish in the morning, poultry or beef in the afternoon, dry food at night. Always something good in the bowl, and water from a fountain at the side, because nothing runs better than water and he knows how it fascinates me from all the bathroom sinks jumped in and gushing taps pawed at. He knows, in the squat, cough, rustle of the morning that I've rolled that way before, flicked fog off a mountain stream or two in a past life. As a lynx, or puma.

In any case it keeps the water fresh, so win-win, I'm impressed. Little fountain, little spring, blue bubbling donut in a brimless hat, paw to maw, dib-dab through the donut hole, lick lick, drippy-drop toe-suck. And if that sounds a little primitive then I'm sorry but it can't all be teacups and opposable thumbs. Left paw drinks, right paw scratches. Left for love, right for spite. We were all animals once, fending for ourselves. Killing things to stay alive, I've heard, and not  for sport.

I used to have milk on a standard saucer but, like most cats, I'm lactose intolerant. We  found that out the hard way. The fountain hums when the house is calm and I note that it runs on a hundred and ten volt circuit, converted by transformer to two-forty. How would I know that? Electrics. Words aren't really our thing, but cats do know electrics.

I know, I know. The last thing you'd expect.

Clunk-slam, click-slam means last call for supper, front door and back, so the first scratch of key on lock finds me diving from the bed (or pillow, which I often favour) quick as a pounce to find him, cock-eared and waiting at the foot of the stairs. It's become a sort of running joke and I play my part while he chuckles, throw a few shapes, tail flick, nose lift, trip-trap fence prance for my supper. None of it hurts. I'm cute as a cartoon. He shuffles into the kitchen and, from his haunches, gloops gravy-meat, pouch to bowl, fountain bubbling at the side and I purr-rub, blink-rub as he touches first my face then the plug, because it does get very, very warm indeed and that's how I know he loves me, because he'd risk the house aflame before my thirst. All for the sake of dual voltage.

If there's a criticism, it's that he drinks too much and retires too early, and that can catch me out, but my ears swivel, chiff-chaff at the slightest noise, even while asleep, which I believe was once a handy survival skill. I've crafted a careful life, of routine and the law of averages, the dependable nurture of a solid mammal.  Food. Water. Generally competent wiring. Fuses in the box. It's a great life, win-win. Yawn. A careful life. 

Dear Virgin Media

Dear Virgin Media Droid,

That was uncalled for. I know you're really a person, so sorry about saying 'droid'. There are levels of customer service in the world that can truly make one wince or gnaw the carpet in frustration. For the most part, though, not at Virgin Media. I'll say that much and hold my hands up. Now I'll put my hands back down to type, noticing, as I do so, all the time on them. The reason I have all this time on my hands is because there's been no internet in my house for ten hours, since about 9am this morning in fact. Tomorrow somebody will come and probably get it working again. Tomorrow afternoon, though; there were no morning appointments available. Shame, because then it'll have been thirty-six hours without internet, and who knows what will have happened?

So while I wait, I thought I'd pen a letter of complaint. I don't want it to be one of those ranty, shouty efforts though, because, let's face it, there's more terrible things going on in the world. In the great scheme of things it'd be churlish to get worked up about a few bits and bobs not working properly while there's poverty and famine and all sorts of celebrities suffering in the jungle.

I don't want to take the easy option and say derogatory things about Richard Branson either because, let's face it, a) you've heard it all before and b) You don't know him personally and you don't care. In any event, I actually think he's doing a pretty decent job. I bet you get cheeky winks of encouragement from him all the time, maybe the odd 'keep it up'. Not personally, but via some sort of company screensaver, or a holographic badge that changes when you turn it.

Anyway, I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, being complimentary about the nature of telephone feedback from Virgin customer services. I can attest to this because I have plenty of experience in the field of phoning you up a lot. I genuinely feel, almost all the time, that I'm talking to a real person, that they exist in reasonable proximity to me geographically, and that they care I'm unhappy. I know you're a person too, perhaps a bit higher up, maybe even with their own desk and kettle. So, I'll tell you what, why don't you settle back, pour yourself some Elderberry tea, and let's both have a little chat?

It'd be all-too easy, I think you'll agree, for me to take some sort of consumerist hard-line and threaten to take my business elsewhere. After all, this has being going on the best part of two years now. I bet you hear that all the time, though. Even though you genuinely care, I bet you still moan inside, when you see yet another poorly-informed, grammatically deficient scrawl of semi-legible abuse land on your desktop. "What shall we do, Mr. Branson?" I bet you say in a sing-song voice, not to him directly but at his life-sized portrait on the wall. And then I bet you squeak back to yourself in a crude approximation of Richard's reply. "Send them a tenner-off voucher and say sorry."

I bet Sky don't do things like that. In fact I know they don't. Some of their customer service bods are downright rude, like they don't even care or something. It's not that we haven't been tempted by Sky, either. They're always popping round, waving futuristic looking devices in our face and offering 'deals' of one sort or another. Either that or buttonholing us outside Tesco. "Can I interest you in our movie package, sir? Try it free for a month?"

"No," I always say on these occasions. "I'm a Virgin Media customer." And when I say it like that they can see that I mean it, and they usually back off and ask me to put the leg of lamb down.

I'll let you into a secret, though. My wife loves Sky. We used to have Sky, but I cancelled it after their 20mb broadband package was mis-sold to me and, rather than drop me down to the free 2mb one (which was the only speed I could achieve anyway) they insisted on taking that extra £5.99 a month. Even when I suggested it would be financial suicide for them to carry on penalising me for six quid when I was spending £120 a month on all kinds of other multi-room goodness, they wouldn't relent. So, of course, at the first opportunity, I took all my business elsewhere - to you, in fact. That's exactly how grudgeworthy poor customer service can make people, and people like me can hold a grudge like pole dancers hold their pelvic floors. Forever, if necessary. I bet I'm not alone there, either.

Anyway, enough of my Sky woes. They were the bad old days, and it gives me an itchy face just to talk about it. You don't have to worry about it either, because your customer service is good, not particularly helpful, but good. So when I say, it'd be 'all-too easy' to take my business elsewhere, I mean the opposite, because that would entail giving it back to those greedy, soulless trolls at Sky and that's something that will never, ever do.

Still, there nonetheless exists a problem and, since I've started this letter now it only seems fair to talk about it. In essence, the problem is quite a serious one, mainly because of the lack of something being done about it. A consistently poor level of service has been provided by your company for about the last two years. During this time, it has become apparent that we have a less than satisfactory signal reception here at our address for the television, telephone and broadband services we pay you for each month. This has led and continues to lead to the following issues:-

Television
- Interactive services unavailable / red button frequently unavailable.
- Channels subject to interference / artifacts, especially HD channels.
- Stuttering sound / popping noises / loss of audio.
- On demand programs frequently freezing or being unavailable.
- Navigation through menus on the TV via the remote control extremely slow and stuttery. Response times in excess of several minutes on some occasions.
- Random resetting of Set top box during programmes.
- V+ Recordings incomplete or corrupted.

Broadband
- Frequent connection dropouts of between 10 mins and twenty-four hours.
- Loss of connection speed during peak hours and school holidays. Fluctuations in bandwidth and quality of connection.
- Wireless devices such as laptops and mobile phones being randomly disconnected or suffering from slow connection speed.
- Packet loss during online gaming, causing lag and stutter.

The broadband issues happen both on wireless devices and on the main wired computer. We recently received a new hub/router from Virgin after several days of particularly horrendous connection problems. One week on, it appears to have done nothing to alleviate the issues. In fact, in terms of the internet they are probably worse than ever. When I called Virgin this morning and we went through some investigative checking, I was told by Mike (lovely chap) that there was no reported fault in the area, the demand / capacity for bandwidth was at 50% or less and that no other modem users within the immediate vicinity had either reported problems or could be physically seen (via modem diagnostics) to have any issues. I'm pretty sure Sky wouldn't have done that. They'd have just traipsed out some tired company script.

On dozens of occasions during the past eighteen months, engineers have been called out to rectify similar, randomly-occurring problems at my address. They don't mind sharing their findings with me either, and I can tell you they are invariably as follows:-

Diagnosis of the set top box reveals that the Db signal ratio is below Virgin's acceptable guidelines. A console message helpfully suggests that the engineer "Remove Attenuation". But the engineer is well aware that there isn't any. The signal from outside is simply too weak.

The engineer then pays a visit to the external cabinet. This is not, as one might suspect, hundreds of miles away but a relatively short distance up the street. He opens the cabinet to discover something akin to an explosion in a spaghetti factory. Somewhere deep in this labyrinthine nest of snakes is our connection, the exact location of which remains inconstant. This is because, at some point in the recent past, a new subscriber has joined the network. Because there is competition for space within the cab, plugs get shifted around. Some plugs may even become 'accidentally' dislodged as I discovered in the summer, when our new neighbour's cable broadband was being installed and our own connection became mysteriously lost. After a passionate discussion with the two gentlemen performing the operation (who were fortunately within collar-grabbing distance of my front doorstep) and one hurried visit to the cab later, the connection was miraculously restored. At whose expense, I'm not entirely certain, and neither do I much care. It might be noted that these installation engineers are a separate team from the engineers who visit for fault calls. I wondered at one point if it might be possible they are in fact terrestrial saboteurs working for Sky, but eventually dismissed the idea after remembering to take my medication.

It should also be noted that this clandestine shifting around of user plugs within the cabinet is due to the fact that the option of using splitters has long since become redundant. Our own connection, I'm reliably informed, runs off five splitters before it reaches a terminal. That is an impressive amount of splitting by anyone's standards.

So it seems as clear to the technician as it is to me that the cabinet is at fault. The cabinet requires auditing. The number of redundant connections inside is doubtlessly high. I've made this suggestion to Virgin Media on a number of occasions over the years and so have the engineers themselves. After all, it is these poor misbegotten souls who are the real sufferers, continually subjected to a fate of scraped knuckles and the dismal job-dissatisfaction of knowing they can accomplish precisely nothing on these visits. "It's the cab," they say, sadly. "Nothing can be done until they sort it." And so, we all of us every day become more convinced that the solution lies out there in that box in the street, rising out of the tarmac like some graffitoed obelisk of hope. Ready to be one day absolved of guilt by the mysterious 'they'. All of us except you.

Sure, fixing it won't bring peace to the middle east, but it will bring something just as important; harmony to my household - a household that presently contains a told-you-so wife, ever more scathing of my provider choice, and teenage children who, in the absence of Facebook and Twitter, are faced increasingly with the cruel prospect of venturing 'outside' and contracting rickets from mobile phone masts.

Here's the other thing as well: on a semi-frequent basis we receive phone calls from other Virgin services such as cheap mobile phone contracts, or savings on our landline calls. Loans are available, also new HD packages, TIVO boxes and so on. "If only," I often opine on these occasions to the bewildered marketeer, "If only your infrastructure budget was as generous as your marketing one." I then go on to tell them how I can only dream of watching a HD movie uninterrupted by the snap, crackle and pop of your outmoded legacy technology. Can only lie awake thinking of a world in which 1000 gigabytes of recording space wouldn't be taken up by an incomplete recording of a snowstorm in the Himalayas that was meant to be Emmerdale. I'd love to be able to say 'yes' to some of those things. I'd quite like a Blackberry for a tenner a month, as it goes. Or a ten grand loan. But I can't, and you're the reason. I'm surprised they haven't been round themselves, to be honest. You've lost them quite a bit of commission. I keep them on the phone a long time too, especially if there's been no internet that night. And I always tell them the truth: "If I can't rely on the services you're failing to provide now, how can you expect me to sign up for new ones?"

Anyway, thanks for listening. I've tried to time this letter to the length of your afternoon break, which I'm hoping is 22 minutes long including toilet time. It's been a break for me too, a break from my wife's newly-minted, yet oft-repeated slogan "Sky's broadband may have been rubbish but at least it was reliable rubbish." And my kids, it's been a break from them too. I'm definitely thinking of sending them outside, but I fear it wouldn't be too long before social services got wind of their obvious 'at-risk' status, highlighted perhaps by the the fact that they're all dressed in sack-cloth and ashes, and two of them are holding signs. One that says 'The end is nigh' and another which simply reads: 'Epic Fail'.

So in some vain, romantic way, even if you don't do anything about the problem again, I'm hoping at least you'll put this letter on the wall next to Richard, a solitary note of poignancy amongst all the ranty, sweary ones that I know you print out and keep as well. I'll console myself with that thought, while spending the rest of the evening wondering how I can get out of having to speak to my family. They're all waiting behind me while I tap away here at the keyboard, arguing over who gets first go of 'solitaire' like a troop of otters squabbling over a fish-head.

The worst thing you could do in these circumstances would be to send me a standard letter, saying how sorry you were and offering some small concession in return. Because then I'd know you did that thing where you talk to Richard's portrait and pretend he answers you back. I'll know you've acted like those engineers who just wanted to get the job they'd been tasked with done and couldn't be bothered engaging with variables outside their remit. I'd rather you were all a bit more imaginative than that, like I've been. If you can't, then I'd rather you didn't reply at all, and I'll trudge reluctantly back to Sky, cap in hand, denunded of dignity, like some shameful junkie.

So, well. Perhaps we'll have an evening by the piano instead. Perhaps I'll go out and buy a piano. I've heard someone sells them in the local pub. Yes, that's it.

Bye.

The Genie

Back in the day you were allowed to buy fireworks for maybe a week or two before bonfire night and once November 5th was over, not thereafter. That was it, for at least another year. No cavalcade of rockets to bring in the New Year, (unless you were some sort of well-heeled Scrooge with a will of iron). No 'phlump, phlump mortar-round fzzt!' of roman candles to light up the birthday skies, unless you were lucky enough to be born after October 31st and before November 6th.

No, once it was all over, seen the androgynous dummy cremated, watched Catherine wheels spin freely, jerkily and not at all, had rockets blaze their trail across the sky and realised that the little pyramid-shaped one that you knew was going to be shit had not disappointed you. Once the serious concerns about how hot the windows were getting had subsided and once something had caught fire that wasn't supposed to and once an older neighbour had to go indoors with chest pains, it was done. Over.

Next day, we'd roam the foggy, post-inferno streets in a daze, like adolescent atrocity survivors, combing the cooling rubble for undischarged fireworks in order to break them open and call forth, from the powder they contained, what was commonly known as The 'Genie'.

'Place on ground.' Yeah, right.

The Genie was a flaky old demon. He didn't always make your wish come true (unless your wish was seared retinas and crop stubble eyelashes) sometimes he didn't even appear, would just give a damp sigh and fizzle off back to his lamp. He hated the rain, and we knew if it had been dry overnight there was a much better chance of a summoning.

Whenever he did appear, explosively and with an eyebrow-singeing 'whumpf!' well now, that was a time. The pile of powder had to be carefully set and a volunteer had to drop the match, someone who had perhaps thus far evaded a bonny night trophy scar - had not had a 'Little Demon' go off in the hand, not felt the molten whip of a toppled bottle rocket. Had not flayed their palm to the bone fishing out baked spuds from the embers of the fire. (I say 'baked', but of course this was much less al fresco Spud-U-Like and much more 'gnawing on starchy, smoke-tasting rocks'.)

As the Chosen One's trembling hands laid flame to the powdery kindling, chants to the Gods were muttered and a respectful path beaten, in case the Gods were wrathful. This swansong represented the greatest unity of Bonfire week. Whatever jealous claim you'd laid to those fireworks in their pristine tubular form was now forgotten as as the Swan Vesta bearer inched closer and you solemnly prayed that their piled-up innards would ignite. Here, a last chance to relive the magic, be privy to the cosmic lightshow, inhale something that smelt like old flintlock pistols and tasted of rotten egg.

We always forgot, somehow, how it would be. That these reanimated pyrotechnics were not bound to an orderly trajectory like their touch-papered counterparts. That their souls were jumbled up and when they cried out, it would be in chaos. If our guile and determination was to pay off, there would be fire and brimstone, a nuclear flash to rival any Tom Clancy novel. Saltpetre and singed nostrils. Afterimages to linger for a week or more; that's what would have made it all worthwhile. The months of canvassing for unwanted timber, the elaborate bonfire dens in which basic carpentry and sex education skills were dispensed with impunity, God willing.

This was the occult finale to the whole event, and, even though we'd used up two wishes each just getting him to appear, the genie symbolised the essence of rebirth. The dead risen, the phoenix from the flames, a closing ceremony to rival any olympic games and a big, whooshing cathartic send-off to whiten our hair and blacken our faces for the next time. As long as we didn't grow up and get old, and sit in nights and make children, there would always be a next time. And as long as the genie appeared to grant our final wish, there would always be a next time.

Nanged-Up With Mr. Whippy

I don't know if his cream charger was a bit leaky, or whether I was particularly susceptible to it. All I know is, whenever his jangly bells (Match of the Day theme, perhaps) sounded around the corner, I'd be first in the queue for Mr. Whippy.

Stop me and ingest one.

Perfectly understandable, you might say, for a young boy in the early 70s, when summers were apt to be long and - perish the thought - hot. Back then, a curly dollop of soft-serve with lashings of additive-laced raspberry syrup in a cone would be just the ticket. Except the drug I'm talking about wasn't ice cream. For one, I almost never had any money to buy one, and for another, there was something almost as good to be found by just standing at the counter and breathing in.

Ahh, I can smell it now, evocative and strangely religious. Now I don't know if many people know this (I certainly didn't until recently) but whipped cream chargers need nitrous oxide or N2O, to operate. So here's the thing: penniless or not, that van was a bong-on-wheels for my curious lungs and, like a needy little whippet, there I'd be, sucking in that heady whiff of ozone and crushed almonds. The machine itself, with whirring guts and perpendicular knob from whence the treat would flow, all cream n' chrome Bakelite, nudged by an expert fist, into swirls of ice-cold nourishing animal fat and whey product, if that's what took your fancy.

But beggars like me couldn't be choosers. So although that machine - belonging in the kitchen of a 1950s American housewife with sturdy grip and cherry-pie smile - could pull out endless extrusions of the curly stuff, it would be forever lost to my impoverished tongue. Instead, I'd breathe in, deep and long, letting the cloudy thrum of diesel fumes from the engine add a bit of a kick to the mix. And it smelled good, like a nasty, naughty, pheromonal heaven of chemical propellant. I'd stand there for as long as I could get away with, and there might, during the course of this infusion, come some gentle mewing, such as that of a cheetah cub at its mother's pap, or a blues player solemnly freebasing in a hovel.

Creamy payload.

After a while, I'd notice the impatience of the queue behind me, the ice-cream man looking at me oddly, or - more likely, plucking at his white coat with a half-stoned look in his eye, and it was then that I'd pull away, sucking on my fingers, saying. "I don't want nothing. I've changed my mind."

Because they were mostly pederasts, these cone-jockeys, and probably whacked up the N20 deliberately, hoping to get us high and capitalise on our innocence. So you had to know when to let it go. Don't get me wrong, given the choice, I'd much rather have been sucking a creamy payload, (in the non-kiddy-fiddling sense) through the bottom of a snagged-off cone. But, as far as consolation prizes go, this one wasn't bad.

Today they call it 'nang' and carry it around in bulbs or 'nang-crackers' that empty into balloons for recreation. I'm certain that one whiff of the stuff would take me straight back to the days of that old jalopy, the 'Happy Van', jangling out its screechy version of 'Blaydon Races' or 'Greensleeves' and a forty-year-old porn tash called 'uncle Robbo' dispensing the nang hits (well, at least the first ones) for free.

And I doubt that many of the nanged-up fourteen year olds plastered over Youtube could say that.

The Stash. A Short Story

So Tony Morris, who covers the North, comes back from his paper mill visit the other day and straight away my ears prick up, because not even double glazing can muffle that whistle of his. Not even solid rock can. So I look up and he's winking like a carnival queen, swaggering towards me with this glossy bundle under his arm. Average seller, Tony, and a cocky sod at the best of times. I'm adding up VAT receipts and the number five keeps sticking, which means there's more till-roll in the bin than street bunting at a Royal wedding, so I'm not in the best of moods.

Anyway, he snakes around the door with this daft tippy-toe style that makes him look like Elmer Fudd and flops a stack of magazines onto my table. "Couple of over-runs for you boss," he winks, and I look at him and say "Is there something wrong with your eye?"


Without dropping the smug expression he nods at the literature knocking January's expense receipts out of alphabetical order and grins: "Pristine." Then taps his nose. "It's not what you know."

You don't do that in a tidy workplace, come in and plonk stuff everywhere like some heathen. But that was Tony, buttering me up in his own clumsy way. I couldn't begin to imagine how many paperclips had leaked through the hole where your computer leads are meant to go, that you always lose the little plastic disc for that covers it up. The whole tub had gone over.

"Just be bloody careful."

His undaunted look of lechery led mine to the boob-laden covers of the magazines. 'Jazz mags' we called them back in the day and, from what I could see they hadn't changed a lot in theme or content. Among such sobriquets as 'Double D Housewives' and 'Barely Legal Babes' were a few familiar ones from my era: 'Escort' and 'Fiesta'. That was the thing about porn back then, it was more refined, somehow; more innocent. Single word titles with 'step inside' attributes. Not spelling it out like common trollops.

"Christ, are they still going?" I said, becoming wistful despite myself.

As we leafed through them, leering like schoolboys, it rose up, large as life. The spotty spectre of furtive youth. Transport to that adolescent era of Clearasil, mood swings and spontaneous erections. Flagship aroma of council-cut grass and the estate where I lived shimmering boldly into view, like a mirage. Fields, carved with quicklime, into football pitches. Maisonettes rising into the murky sky; flares and white dog shit. A candlewick bedspread flapping on a neighbours line. My older mate pointing at the streak of ecru across its middle and sniggering, 'Bet it's spunk'.

There was a truck stop nearby. Greasy smell of oil on hot tarmac. Hempy whiff of ropes lashing tarpaulins down. DERV they called it then, not diesel, but it would still make rainbows in puddles that dogs allegedly drank from and were driven mad by. Anyway - if, on one long, boring day of those endless summer school holidays, with nothing to do (as my friend Peter Johnson famously put it) except 'watch Hong Kong Phooey and have loads of wanks'; if, on one of those particular days you were apt to scour the low suburban hedges, you would find, not only Blackbird's nests (they were ten a penny - it was the commonest egg in anyone's collection) but a trove of filth that truck drivers sometimes left behind.

Of course, I couldn't make any such connection back then, at fourteen. Couldn't know that it was truckers who were responsible, same as I couldn't know that Peter Johnson was a double phallic name. Incidentally, I think it was Peter Johnson who bet it was spunk, rather than aggressive bleaching on Mrs. Weatherby's bedsheet, and Pete's dad was a truck driver. It all made a kind of cosmic sense.

Anyway, there they were, hidden in the bushes: well-thumbed scraps of Knave, Penthouse and Mayfair, christened by bird shit and crinkled where dogs had cocked their legs. Titles that were modest and arty, like erm,  Razzle, with its penchant for amateur-style photography and messy burger shots and Hustler, with added penetration. All fairly bewildering to the unschooled eye, but for me, this tattered, incomplete outdoor library of filth was the closest to sex education I would ever come, because my dad was neither a truck driver nor had a suspiciously thick mattress.

Gazing now at the shiny folios on my office desk launched me squarely into flashback; the day I found an immaculate stack of them, tucked away near a priveted ginnel on Briar Hill. Three things were perfect about the occasion. One, they had clearly not long since been deposited by Long-Distance Stan, who could now presumably dispense missionary relief to Domestic Doreen with a clear conscience. Two, they were (apart from the odd stuck page) remarkably complete. Three, it was the drought summer of seventy-six. They were bone dry. Actually, thinking about it, there was fourth: I was on my own that day, no sharesies.

It was like stumbling onto a Necronomicon of Fanny, a shady hinterworld of come-hither looks and grown-up desires, populated by ladies called "Vanessa, from Cirencester" with their own Private Idaho growing down there like some kind of testament to topiary. I coveted them jealously, poring in secret, over each photo-spread, each tacky cartoon, each softcore Betamax production review with Maria Shriver or Sylvia Kristel. But the letters, especially the ubiquitous Reader's Letter - 'I am not normally inclined to write to this sort of publication, being a tireless servant of the Women's Institute, but felt I had to confide about a recent experience while supervising an over-60s fell walk...' These were the final piece of the puzzle, the words that defined the images. It was a Rosetta Stone of awakening, here, in my sweaty palms, in plain English, laid bare. This was it, what our parents did when we were tucked up in bed at night, listening to the muffled alien cries, rhythmic headboard percussion and gentle sough of plaster coming away from the walls.

The 'He fucked me like a badger in heat' style typified by the 'grittier' mags got a bit old after a while so I gravitated toward the more upmarket confession, such as might be found between the covers of Playboy or Club. Here was a classier style of prose, with proper spelling and even punctuation. Also, there were words in these that I had never come across before, so I knew I was on the right track.

Two things took some serious hammer that summer, and the second was my dictionary. Once, when mum asked what the heck I was looking up this time, I abstractly said "Cunnilingus". Fortunately, she didn't know what it meant either and went back to ironing 'wunda-web' onto the turn-ups of my school trousers. Slowly though, bit by bit, I deciphered all this arcane terminology and proceeded to sell it to wide-eyed schoolboys, behind the bike sheds and huddled around the worn 'D' of the five-a-side pitch. An explanation of Clitoris was worth ten pence or half a Curly Wurly. In my reverie, I wondered how many of them, like me, felt short-changed by the 'glorious pink nubbin' they had come to envision when they finally found one. Perhaps some of them still haven't. Likewise labia and vulva, although there was almost a riot the day Cuckoo Simmonds found all three referenced openly in a standard biology textbook. "Ahh, yes - but," I protested madly at the hostile crowd, "where does it say 'Doggy style' eh? Where are the 'shuddering orgasms? The 'looping strings of pearly jizz'?"

Currency of a bygone era.

At that point the daydream ends and I'm back to my deskbound self. Two truths strike me with the existential force of epiphany. One: how tame these once-revered publications now seem in the context of the internet, where everything is done to everybody else at once, usually with a harnessed animal or two in tow. If you went to an orgy these days, you'd need a kilo of duracells, a daypass for World of Leather, and a horse box.

Tony looks at me and says, "You okay, boss, need owt else?"

"Nah," I say, feeling an obscure, heartfelt pang for Vanessa, of Cirencester, if only to give her a comb and tell her to tidy herself up. I'm not his boss, just a lowly clerk, it's all part of the process. What he's after.

The wink returns. "Enjoy, then. Err, you will get that expenses cheque to me before Tuesday. Tough month see?"

"I know," I say sharply, and the second thing dies on my tongue, because I suddenly recognise that if it was true I wouldn't be sitting here on a lumbar cushion, with paper cuts, using a stolen adding machine. If I say what I believe it will just add to all the sadness in the world I seem to have failed to move on from. If I say it aloud he will know that too, and it'll embarrass us both that he'll have to pretend it's true, and between the awkward silence and the inevitable tit joke, I'll see the pity in his eyes. So I wait for the inevitable tit joke and whisper it at the same time his Gucci watch clinks against the closing door.

"I used to be twice the salesman you are."

Spiders Can Shit Off

My cousin is picking them off a web-ridden paddling pool in the shed, prior to loading said pool into his car. Not little ones mind, massive fuck-off ones with Hulk Hogan legs.

No. Just. No

"There you go, little buddy," he says as it scuttles up his arm and he plucks it off, laying it considerately on my car windscreen. I'm hanging onto my gorge while pretending to be cool, knowing I've helped him carry it, and that there are strands of gossamer all over my hands and face and that the chances of one of those hessian-backed gorgons not being about my person somewhere are practically nil. My skin is quite literally crawling, and I leave him rescuing more on the driveway and stumble ashen-faced into the kitchen, spitting drily and doing that panicky thing where you look over each shoulder in turn and brush repetitively with your hands wherever you can't see.

As I make him a coffee, my cover is blown. There's a hairy tickle on my neck, as the fugitive departs the well of my collar-bone, where he has been harbouring as an illicit arachnid passenger, now seeking the safety of higher ground, via my neck and blanched cheek.

"YEEEEARRRRRRCHH!" I scream. I say scream, it was more a sort of ululating death-cry, such as popularised by the film 'Zulu'. There aren't really enough caps or vowels on my keyboard to do it full justice.

Even in that emotional state though, and with the barest nod toward masculinity, I resolve not to jab blindly, but to try and pluck it off in that same casual way, but my hand refuses to soften and it squishes between my thumb and forefinger. Squishes! Oh, don't make me describe that feeling of bristly succulence as it's lifeblood vents on the webbing between thumb and finger, leaving a dark ichor glistening dully there, under the kitchen spotlights. The poor chap falls to the linoleum, fatally crippled, and I'm scrubbing my hands in the washing-up bowl like the Lord High Emperor of OCD.

"What was that?" he says, tramping in moments later with his spider hands and gossamer face.

"Oh nowt," I say, palpitating shallowly with an outstretched mug of cappuccino and kicking its twisted corpse under the table. "Kids, probably. Upstairs. Tch."

Leggings: The Closet War.

So I'm staring at a row of fifty-odd non-slip coat-hangers (space savers, they call them) in the wardrobe and wondering why it feels like the dawn of something sinister. Slim and black, the clothes hang uniformly from them like a particularly tactile Hitler Youth gathering. Despite all this apparent tidiness,  planet wardrobe still seems sad. I ponder its meaning for a moment before realising it is lifeless and barren, this new regime. Sterile, with no chaos to offset the order (a bit like when mankind couldn't get on with the first Matrix cause it was all a bit cosy and utopian.) 

Kristallnacht.

What's lacking here, I slowly conclude, is ethnic variety. What happened to those chunky, wooden beech-boy hangers that kicked sand in your face, or at least gave you a slap in the eyebrow if you snatched your T-shirt off too hard? Or those old-school wire ones that left smudges of lead on your hands and buckled uselessly under the flimsiest of pressure? There's even a sudden place in my heart for those daft-looking hangers they tried to reinvent the wheel with, by attaching a sort of  framework to accommodate Elizabethan gowns or blacksmiths pinafores on. But, I can see there's no place for any of that in this Brave New World. These deviants were silently earmarked for cleansing long ago, then dragged silently from their beds one night to be stuffed into mass graves of charity shops and Tesco recycling ovens. All in the name of 'progress'.

Of course I'm not so easily fooled. Shoes, as is so often the case, are the catalyst for this axis of evil.  Shoes and Kipling handbags and Dennis Basso coats that have multiplied and won't fit under the stairs any more. When shoes and handbags and Dennis frigging Basso coats can't keep it in their pants, you can bet it won't be long before they've annexed the wardrobe. Then perfectly good wood and sturdy(ish) iron gets melted down for clothes pegs. Worse, comfy sweatshirts and jogging bottoms are ousted from their homes and herded into musty gulags called 'bed drawers', never to be seen again.

So yes, I'm bitter,  because it's always my territory - I mean wardrobe - that suffers. Just because someone needs an entire nation - I mean wardrobe - for the several hundredweight of leggings that ALWAYS have a victory salute for fashion's Final Solution. That's the bottom line, comrades. Leggings, in their many evil guises, turn women into power-mongers. And in case it has to be spelled out to you, in case you're one of those men who think."Yeah, they're tacky and unflattering on anything less than a roller-skating teen, but what harm can they do?" Well, let me tell you, my friend, when a certain little lady first combined jackboots with Lederhosen and called them 'jeggings' that's exactly what the Nazis thought. "What harm can they do?" Just chilling with our Reichstag buddies here in this Bavarian hillside retreat. We've all had a drink. Let her have her fun; no-one need know.

One night. One shining moment. Was that so wrong?

You think the ruthless reign of leggings left any room in poor Adolf's wardrobe for the Wehrmacht equivalent of hair shirts and Speedos? No sir, and once those pernicious pants took their seat of power, wasn't it just a few short goose-steps up the Champs-Elysee to disaster for the mighty Wehrmacht? French resistance? American firepower? Bulldog spirit? Forget it. One word: Leggings.

And while we're at it, who do you think it was convinced the Fuhrer that the world's most powerful men could win a war dressed as Finchley show-jumpers? Eva Braun, that's who. The real fist in the velvet glove. The real smile behind the Swastika. Don't be so naive.

Men everywhere need to examine their complacency, that's all I'm saying. Leggings are nothing less than the hidden master race promoting evil and hatred to anyone not allied to their cause. And just when you think that threat has been exterminated for good, out comes a subtle variation, imbued with the same mad designs. The Ski pant, the pedal pusher, the jodhpur?  Greater  monsters than any power-crazed warlord.

So if that feeling of unease I was talking about had a voice, it would be saying. "Wake up, Waldo" (even though I'm not called Waldo) "There's a new revolution going on; a new night of the long knives, and it's beginning again, right here in your own wardrobe."

Of course, I say 'my wardrobe' - but in reality there's more chance of Palestinians saying 'my place' in Tel Aviv. Come to think of it, my wardrobe has more in common with modern-day Gaza than it ever did with Ikea, and,  just for the record - what was the Middle East garment of choice behind this divisive landfall? What was and is still worn unwittingly beneath the Jubba and Burqa of desert man and woman alike, clinging lightly yet firmly to the hairy legs of latent unrest, forging mistrust and violence across the free world quicker than you can say '60% lycra'?

Leggings.

So fine,  it all starts with a few new coat-hangers in town, pushing their weight around and creating a bit of 'lebensraum', But, before you know it, the latter-day Eva Brauns, the fairer-sex Commandants of QVC have conceived their New World Order, and it comes ready-made and razor-wired up with Dennis Basso Belsens and Kipling bag Lubyankas for all who stand before it.

So when you're leading your children tearfully through the gates of that apparel Auschwitz, and  when they point - confused and wretched - at the coat-hanger wire legend 'Primark Macht Frei' hanging above it and say "Why, dad? Why?"...

I'm just saying. You were  warned.

Year of the Mouse, Pt. 3.

The Purrfect Solution.


You've seen that movie with Lee Evans in, Mousehunt, and had a chuckle at all the anguished bungling and ruined lives, for the love of one little mouse. It seems a far-fetched caper, even for Hollywood. But while Lee was only hamming it up and walked away with a zillion quid for his trouble, I'm left here, gurning with genuine rage, agonising over new schemes to get shut of the pest.

First, though, some intelligence gathering. The first clue for the mouse file comes unexpectedly, while my cousin and I are nattering over coffee in the garden one afternoon.

"There's your mouse," he says, cocking his head to the shed.

"What? Where?"

"Just came through that bit of offcut pipe, past your strawberries and slipped under the decking."

In fairness a small foal could get in there.

It is my second inkling of the kind of gaps these critters can get through. The radiator seems like a conservatory by comparison. The slit between wall and decking is little thicker than a playing card.

"Under there?" I say, aghast.

"Yup. They can flatten their spines into their stomachs. Probably got their own underground world down there."

"I think it's just the one," I say unconvincingly. And ripping up thirty square metres of decking isn't my idea of fun, so the wife isn't going to hear about this one. I always assumed mousey lived exclusively indoors, but the fact he can come and go at will makes me think about his tradesman's entrance, and I eye the overflow pipe and dishwasher outlet warily.

Days later I buttonhole the next-door neighbour, advising her to look out for critters. She hasn't been in the property long and lives on her own, but it seems she has already had the standard rodent welcome.

"Had to take the settee apart," she says, with a shudder. "It was living inside."

"That sounds familiar," I say, and go on to describe various highlights of mousey's year-long stay, including the bedcovers scream from the wife that Sunday, which doesn't go down too well. She cringes visibly, turning paler still. "I can't bear hearing it scratching everywhere. There's traps and poison down now, that should do it, right?"

"Err, yeah. Good luck with it," I mutter, thinking of our own collection of vermin lures that remain fossilised with peanut butter and rust.

From the increasingly neurotic conversation comes a further clue. Her new neighbours the other side asked if she'd seen 'all the field mice yet' and she laughed at the time, wondering if it was some colloquial joke. But, thinking about it, there's an old shed in their garden, she says. A perfect breeding ground, untouched for long periods and set into the soil. Their house had been empty for many months before the sale, and even now they only occupy it for four months of the year, living in Cyprus the rest.

Did you see something just move?

This new update explains some dimensional anomalies I was perhaps in denial about. The first mouse, who interrupted my morning ablutions was scraggy and dark brown in colour. The one in the radiator was smaller, sleeker and of an, erm, mousier colour. Another time, watching it clump up the stairs from my desk, I thought it had bigger ears. The shed theory makes one thing sickeningly clear. It is not just one mouse we are dealing with, but a succession of clones, each more cunning than the last. It is from their rickety community residence that they plot to take over the world; a chilling conspiracy to sizzle the brisket of any Englishman and awaken, finally, a touch of Blighty spirit. This whiskery Third Reich grew in my imagination, jackbooting its way in columns down the Champs-Elysee of the potting shed, through the Arc de Triomphe of our front doors, looking for something to gnaw on.

Not on my watch.

"They probably have a weekly lottery to see who gets the presidential suite and vol-au-vents," I joke, trying to make light of it through narrowed eyes. "By which I mean there's only ever one. Considerate, in a way."

"Sneaky shits," she shudders, and sneaks gingerly into her empty house, clearly wishing she could shoot the messenger too.

So I may have the diplomatic nous of Prince Philip on ketamine, but it's clear now. The combination of their shed and my decking makes for a flourishing population, where six lucky ticket holders each week get to check into the Dorchester of their choice from the half-dozen houses connecting their garden stronghold.

There's only one place to go from here, and it rhymes with Datsun Cogs Gnome.

Carole wants him cute and fluffy, but I want him mean. A combination of all three would be ideal, and by a stroke of serendipity, there he is. Black as night, disembowelling a twig on his cage floor.

"Look at him, he's a killer."

"He's not! Just a kitten. Aww, how cute!"

So our new saviour mews skittishly from his box on the passenger seat, a twelve-week old ball of fur, unaware that he is about to enter a life of hunting Nirvana, as well as an inordinate amount of injections, pampering and fake, catnip-filled mice to practice on.

"What shall we call this beautiful boy?" asks Carole.

"Churchill," I declare, pursing out a puggish frown. "For he will bite them on the feetses."

It was clearly one of those rhetorical questions women ask before they tell you. "I used to have a Gizmo before, We're calling him that."

Of course it's early days, but while the scratches heal on my hands and our curtains hang in shredded strips, things are certainly looking up for a winter clearout. Progress below in the form of a training video.