Proof I’m Not An Axe Murderer

Over the long years of writing this blog some of you have, on occasion, thrown yourselves shamelessly at me. Showered me with invitations to hook up and meet. Quick but passionate rendezvous in love hotels and back streets where the bins are secluded and not too dirty.

I have as a rule refused to acquiesce to your requests (means I said no).

This decision has been driven by two things: (1) a desire not to render the rest of your existence flat, drab and unappealing by comparison to the glorious sunburst of life that a meeting with me would engender and (2) I’m rather skittish about meeting new people and despite the fake protestation of (1) above I am actually quite paranoid that I myself would come across as flat, drab and unappealing compared to the literary personality that inhabits this blog. I fear I would not live up to the easily obtainable personality goals I have set myself because no matter how low I set the bar I can almost always be relied upon to not quite reach it.

I live in fear of personality fail.

So this has meant a lot of flattering requests over the years (well, 2 that I can actually recall) and the same number of disappointing responses.

August of this year changed all that when quite out of the blue a fellow blogger turned up at my place of work having journeyed all the way from New Zealand. I must point out that an interview with me wasn’t the purpose of the trip, just an aside, as the blogger in question – Lady Mondegreen – had family and friends over here in the UK whom she’d long been planning to visit.

She’d written to me a few times asking how I would feel if she happened to drop in and see me. I did that English thing of responding positively because I harboured the suspicion that it was just never going to happen.

Well, suddenly it had and it was. And actually I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. And unless Lady Mondegreen says different I don’t think I performed too badly. I think I met and perhaps even exceeded the bar. We had a pub lunch and a damned good chat and it genuinely was like meeting an old friend. All very relaxed and easy and wonderfully life affirming. It proved that being open to new experiences and opportunities can be an enlivening philosophy and is to be recommended. Though I must here point out that all thoughts of love hotels and passionate bins were eschewed.

Lady Mondegreen is now back in New Zealand and neither of us appears to have been permanently scarred by our encounter. And so, heady with the bravado of success I feel the urge to extend an open invitation to all my regular readers. If you’re ever in the area and want to say hello – a quick coffee and a bite to eat, whatever’s your poison – then do feel free to drop me a line and make it a date.

I don’t bite. I make some effort toward entertaining conversation. I will try to be urbane and debonair. And I promise to keep my animal magnetism under control (but do keep me away from the pub bins just in case).

The Power Of Nerd

I’m reading David Mitchell’s Back Story at the moment – one of my Christmas presents from Karen. I like David Mitchell. I like his sarcastic rants and his double sided logical approach to the many stupidities of life. His book makes for a thought provoking, enlightening read and both confirms and debunks many of the general perceptions that we probably all harbour regarding David Mitchell’s true self.

One of the things I found interesting was his discovery of comedy and theatre and how it completely shunted him off traditional academe and into the realm of Footlights and fame and performance... so much so that his academic studies were all but abandoned in favour of sketch and play writing.

Believe it or not I too had dreams of writing comedy when I was in my teens.

Indeed I dabbled quite extensively. I wrote scripts that myself and my sisters performed via rudimentary microphones onto C90 tape – I even performed my own foley work. I drew cartoons. Once I had improved my recording equipment my mate Dave and I ad libbed our way through many a Saturday night in the early 1990’s coming up with enough sketches, impressions and jokey songs to make our own radio programme.

Most of it was excruciatingly bad, of course. Teenage toilet humour, puerile sex jokes and brickbats of buffoonery that targeted the most obvious of social stereotypes. Hardly high comedy. But in amongst the swamp of post school-boy, clod-hopping satire there were a few nuggets of genuine comedy. Material that would actually make an outsider laugh and laugh for all the right reasons, i.e. laughing with us not at us (though technically laughing at us). Because we had done something deliberately funny and not just because we had made complete arses of ourselves.

What frustrates me the most now (aside from Katie McGrath not returning my emails) is how little I did with it. All that material I produced, all that energy I invested... and then I just let it all sit and mildew. My God, why didn’t I send it into the BBC or some farty little local radio station? They might have hated it. They might have hated it but nevertheless given us advice to improve it.

They might have loved it.

This laziness and lack of motivation even in the face of achieving your wildest dreams is not uncommon in teenagers. Even David Mitchell refers to interest he received from an agent very early in his nascent career but that he didn’t really follow through on or capitalize on. The agent merely asked David to keep in touch but David didn’t. And in the end the agent dropped his interest.

Of course in the end, it worked out for David. He continued with the dream, pursued it, lived it. Trod the boards so to speak.

Have I continued to tread the boards or did I give up on it? I’m really not sure how to answer that. I certainly don’t write sketches or plays anymore or sing comedy songs. But I have been known to inject my novels and even my blog posts with the odd heroin hit of humour.

But it’s not the same is it?

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d joined a theatre group or gone to university in my teens "when I was supposed to" rather than in my late twenties when I’d finally summoned up the nerve.

And that I think is the difference between me and Mr Mitchell. We’re both nerds – I’m sure he won’t object to me saying that – but he had more guts than I did and a hell of a lot more nerve. More nerve to turn his back on his academic studies and pursue a crazy dream despite the huge risk of failure.

My trouble is I’ve always played it safe.

And you’ll never play to a full house playing like that.

Class

The way it was always told to me, not long after Chamberlain had declared war on Germany, my grandfather – barely 19 years of age – had hotfooted it around to the RAF recruiting office to sign up. He no doubt fancied himself kitted out with one of those stiffened scarves and leather goggles and chewing on a choice cigar from the comfort of his cockpit as he strafed a few Heinkels with a careless flick of his thumb on the joystick.

And who wouldn’t? The RAF, even before the Battle of Britain, had an air of the glams about it. I mean, dash it all, but those chaps were just plain dashing. Why yomp across France when you can sit at the controls of possibly the best plane ever built and let a Rolls-Royce Merlin carry you all the way to the theatre of battle in style?

But the RAF didn’t want my grandfather. They told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have the brains to be a spitfire pilot or any other kind of pilot. He wasn’t made of the right stuff, see. He wasn’t educated properly. He’d made it through a decent enough school but he was indelibly working class. As far as the RAF were concerned he was a yomper if ever there was one. They no doubt looked at him through their steely monocles and muttered under their breaths, “Not one of us.”

And so despite, the urgent country-wide call to arms, the RAF declined my grandfather’s enthusiastic offer and the legend of The Leamington Baron was shot down before it even got off the runway.

If my grandfather was ever embittered by this show of classism he never showed it. He was resilient and perhaps just plain pragmatic enough to depart the RAF recruiting office with a cheery wave and an “Okay gov’nor” and hop over the threshold of the recruiting office immediately next door and find himself signed up by the Royal Navy. They snatched his hand off and had him rated as able-bodied before you could say “hard to starboard”.

He loved his time in the Navy. He loved the travel. He loved the camaraderie. Not that he was blinded by his love – he didn’t like the torpedoes, or the magnetic mines or the time his ship had its stern completely blown off and they had to rely on luck and the skill of their captain to limp them miraculously to the dicey safety of a Maltase port – but I can see from his war photos that the Navy changed him. It broadened his outlook. It completed his education in a way that a stint with the RAF would never have done. So he was never a member of a gentleman’s club or got a nickname like “Squiffy” or “Ack-Ack”... but he got to see India, North and South Africa, Malta, Iceland, even a few Russian ports.

He saw parts of the world that a boy from the working class slums of Leamington Spa would not ordinarily have got to see. And though the officers on board ship were just as high born as those of the RAF there was a closeness and equality (of sorts) born of spending months and months together in the equivalent of a tin can with no other company than the burly chaps around you. The respect that was engendered went both ways. In that respect war is a great leveller.

If it wasn’t for my Nan’s reluctance to travel I have no doubt my grandfather would have left these shores far behind him after the war and I’d be writing to you from South Africa. My grandfather loved his shore leave there and often spoke fondly of it in the years before his death in 2009. Not that he particularly regretted staying put in Blighty – he and my Nan gadded about quite a bit during their retirement years and saw as much of the world as they could – but I’m sure he occasionally dreamed of what could have been; if things had been different.

For all that though my grandfather did well for himself after the war. Yes, he did manual work but he was well paid for it. He aspired to be comfortable and he achieved it. He ended up owning his own house and car and was as far removed from those childhood slums as it was realistic to expect to be.

At the end he could have looked those RAF officers in the eye and got a polite nod in return. He’d earnt his wings.

The first casualty of war might be innocence but one of the last was class.

On The Prowl

You’ve had the same meat, week in, week out for the last God knows how many years. The same meat cooked the same way, with the same sauce. Vanilla vanilla vanilla.

You get to the point where you fancy a change. Something a bit different. Something a bit spicy, perhaps. A bit exotic. Something that resurrects your old enthusiasm for the dish. Reminds you of when you were young and it was all fresh, new and exciting. Before the ennui set in. Before you became over-familiar. Bored. Before you had to fake it.

How was it for you, dear?

Yeah. Yeah. Great. Are we done? Good, ‘cos I really need to sleep now.

And you hit the z’s knowing full well you’ll have to go through the same charade again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.

Unless you do something. Unless you find, I don’t know, ingredient X. A new flame.

Well, I’m on the hunt for ingredient X. I’m on the prowl. And all offers will be welcomed, considered and one might even be accepted.

I’m not quite sure what ingredient X is but I know it has some of these components:

a) A better wage. No point making a change unless I get more money.
b) More kudos. That would be nice. No more poop-scooping or shoving buckets under leaky urinals.
c) Less crap responsibilities and more good responsibilities. Hell, we all want that but that doesn’t devalue the demand.
d) The ability to leave work at the office at the end of the day and not get rung at home, without fail, every holiday and 2 out of 3 weekends.
e) A better class of workmate. Could write oodles here but can’t, if you see what I mean.
f) I’m prepared to bargain-plea with most of the above but a) and e) are non-negotiable.

Trouble is, for all my hunting skills, my flint headed spears are finding scant prey to be launched at. New job opportunities are a bit thin on the ground.

I know that, in theory, this means I should turn back to the bony carcass of my existing job, make peace with it, cuddle up to it like we’re a couple of old spoons and be reconciled.

But. I. Just. Can’t. Do. It.

I’m sick of the same old bitter meat. The same old bitter meat topped with poisonous gravy.

I fancy an Indian. Or an Italian. Or a Chinese. Hell, even a vegetarian moussaka would do the trick. Anything.

Anything but this.

I’m shrivelling up. And I’m going to lose it if I don’t use it.

So I’m on the prowl.

On the prowl for something new. Something exciting.

I just need a decent shot at it.

Just one.