On Being an Absolute Stinker

On Monday, I visited the grand opening of a newly refurbished Georgian hotel in my town and was utterly horrified by what I saw as the cheap, incredibly insensitive and utterly tasteless ‘restoration’. I sent a long splenetic text to a client who, as an interior designer, might be expected to share an interest in such things:

Can hardly bear to look at it. The combination of the words ‘Georgian’ & ‘boutique’ has me reaching for my horsewhip. As for the MFI-style chaise lounge, of which they are evidently so proud, the putrid colour scheme (Diary-of-an-Edwardian-Lady twee meets trendy coordination from a DIY ‘Bugger Up Your Home on the Cheap’ guide) and the hateful little bowls of artistic twigs … sorely tempted to borrow a muck spreader from Mike [a farming friend & fellow programmer].

On Tuesday, I go into a major panic when Mike tells me that client was the designer behind the refurbishment. However, ever the resourceful cad, I realised an ever-so-slight volte face was in order and penned the following:

So you were the interior designer for the hotel, were you? I suspected as much while gazing in stunned admiration and awe at the place last night. Such flair, such sheer elegance could only be your doing. Even ironically postmodernist little touches like the red grouting on the black tiles or the droll little jars of twigs spoke of a consummate artist. As for that exquisite chaise lounge, words fail me and tears course down my cheeks in mute eloquence. The town is surely unworthy of such a palace of sensual delights. I salute you.

By the bye, I suspect that my email & text messaging systems may have been hijacked by some contemptible rustic philistine. Ignore anything I might appear to have sent you. Loyalty prevents me from so much as hinting that Mike is entirely to blame.

Not sure if it will work.

Notes on the Romanesque

Pining for Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture in a country dominated by the ghastly and barbarous Northern Gothic, I recently made the lamentable mistake of visiting the Italianate Church of St Mary and St Nicholas at Wilton. This was foolish as although the façade is acceptable from a distance, the 19th Century church’s detailing & interior should be avoided like the plague.

Having recently re-visited the utterly perfect San Miniato al Monte, I found the gross vulgarity of Victorian ersatz architecture almost too much to bear. With its lovingly hewn stone & marble, the Italian basilica is a testament to a profound faith – albeit one grounded in humanity – and is the product of generations of skilled artisans; Thomas Henry Wyatt’s concrete neo-Romanesque construction is the product of engineering and Victorian acquisitiveness. It seems that the crass yet somehow aptly named Hon. Sidney Herbert couldn’t bring back an actual church as a souvenir of his grand tour so instead had one knocked up on his estate. Were he alive today, he would doubtless be the proud possessor of a plastic tourist reproduction of Michelangelo’s David or even an oh-so-droll kitchen apron featuring the statue’s penis.

Having said all this, Wilton Church serves a purpose but only if firmly kept in one’s peripheral vision as though it were an afterimage of the real thing. The purpose is, of course, to act as a mute reproach to the horrors of Northern gothic and to the vulgar excesses of Northern nature itself.

To make a proper comparison between the commendable restraint of Italian Gothic and the ill-bred exuberance, or gushiness, of Northern counterpart, take nearby Salisbury Cathedral, a building created by skilled stone masons and other craftsmen rather than by penny-pinching architectural purveyors of holiday souvenirs.

Much lauded by upwardly-gazing dribbling rustics and tourists, Salisbury veers towards an unthinking celebration of the thrust of nature pointing ever upwards. Calling to mind a cabbage run to seed or – more obviously and crudely – a rampant rampaging phallus, the thing is out of all proportion both aesthetically and spiritually. A lapidary ode to vascular congestion, Salisbury is at one with the perfectly foul club-wielding Cerne Abbas Giant and is, incidentally, the subject of Golding’s novel, The Spire (the title is revealing in its use of a synecdoche). Its one redeeming feature is that, being an example of Early English Gothic, it is less infested by the writhing stone tendrils of, say, York Minster or Gloucester Cathedral.

Northern Gothic in whatever form involves a craven submission to both the supernatural and to nature; and by nature I don’t just mean the grossly all-pervasiveness green stuff we find all around us, but also the baser urges so celebrated by writers such as D.H. Lawrence. In the case of Salisbury one might go so far as to see it as at one with the kind of reductionist thought exemplified by the likes of Richard Dawkins. One might speculate that the early Church was so anxious to dominate primitive beliefs and cults through assimilation that it became infected.

A clue to the Romanesque’s superiority to the Northern Gothic is in the name (coined by later art historians). Yes, it possesses Gothic elements but these are subject to severe classical restraint.

Take, for example, the exquisite San Miniato. The building sits full square on the earth; there is no turgid thrust for the skies. The undemonstrative polychrome patterns on the façade are elegantly geometrical; there are no wildly twisting and thrashing organic tendrils. The five arches on the lower register and the decorative ones above are Roman and suggest calm stability (were they Gothic there would be a rippling tension). The building is comfortable as its own focus; it is not pointing elsewhere to some false transcendence. Above all, it is a building that does not seek to brow beat the viewer into submission to some entirely other divinity; rather, it respectfully invites calm contemplation. For its builders the divine and the human were one and the same and both transcended brute nature.

On Not Grasping the Rules

I was slightly preoccupied with code yesterday when my wife asked if a particular handbag was “OK for Florence”. I never really understand questions like that so I grunted in a vaguely positive way. This, it transpired, was something of a mistake.” You aren’t really taking this holiday seriously, are you?”

Trying to redeem myself, I pointed at another handbag & told her with huge, almost maniacal enthusiasm that I thought that one was perfectly lovely and just the thing for Tuscany. It turned out I was digging a far bigger hole for myself. Any halfway decent husband would have remembered that his wife had carried that one last year.

Goings On in HM Prison Service

On the way back from Salisbury Hospital this afternoon, I heard the most inane program on Radio 4, All in the Mind. Sharon, who is obviously very well qualified with presumably nothing less than a full NVQ in gormless therapy and deeply concerned applied niceness, pointed out that many people in British prisons are really quite depressed.

Another of Sharon's astonishingly astute observation was that prisoners had "a lot going on for them" (she repeated this striking expression no less than 3 times). Aside from depression, the things they had mainly got going on for them were severe learning difficulties. So nice of Her Majesty's Prison Service to recruit people with whom these sad wretches evidently feel comfortable.

On the Kindle & Kindling

You would have imagined that a product aimed at bookworms would have been given a better, slightly less biblioclastic sounding name. Books have been kindled throughout history, although only two instances spring immediately to mind: the Nazi bonfires of the 1930s and the burning of the Satanic Verses by Islamofascists in 1988. (An irreverent thought springs to mind: were the latter incident to have taken place today, would the bearded ones have gone to the vast expense of buying lots of electronic ‘readers’, downloading Rushdie’s novel and then burning them?) One wonders at what temperature Amazon’s Kindle kindles – presumably not at Fahrenheit 451.

Of course, electronic gadgets are incredibly attractive … and they remain so for at least a week or so after purchase. When confronted with the choice of a brand new Kindle or a musty second-hand book, one’s inner Caliban reaches out for the digital device, primitive hairy digits trembling with barely restrained excitement. The nasty horrid book isn’t shiny white; it doesn’t have buttons for turning pages or for making annotations; being made from paper, it can’t boast an incredible paper-like screen; and it certainly doesn’t have any USB ports.

Having gazed unenthusiastically at his free copies of ‘classic’ books, Caliban tries not to dribble too much over his new toy as he struggles to download one of the many best sellers available from the Amazon site. Now that he has spent some $489 on the Kindle, he is in the fortunate position of being able to buy electronic books at only $9.99 a copy. Ignoring the Kindle Store’s basic economics section, Caliban turns to popular fiction. Maybe, The Da Vinci Code will be easier to read with a paper-like screen. He reaches for his credit card.

Ariel gazes sadly at the neglected non-virtual second-hand book, The Essays of Joseph Addison. Despite having been published in 1898, there has been no battery failure and it is working surprisingly well. Even the marginalia-feature is still functioning perfectly – the book has been liberally annotated in copperplate handwriting by its extremely erudite Victorian first owner. Ariel turns a page with almost as little effort as Caliban clicks away at his buttons and considers how amazing it is to acquire a completely wireless entertainment device for a mere £2.

Being Thorough in All Things; 101 Uses for NHS Forms

I have the deepest, deepest respect for the National Health Service, particularly as in about fifteen days’ time an amazingly capable and fantastically proficient NHS surgeon is going to drill a tiny, tiny hole into my leg and fix a lumpy-bumpy just above my dear little tummy button. Obviously, it would be preferable if doctors could bring themselves to use adult terms like keyhole surgery, navel and hernia, but they seem to find this kind of inane baby talk strangely comforting. Perhaps it helps them forget the gory butchery of the operating theatre.

I won’t bore you with the technicalities. Suffice it to say that the operation is immensely complicated, very hi-tech and – to use an unfortunate phrase – absolutely cutting edge. As far as can be gathered, it involves a miniaturized submarine crewed by a team of especially athletic and photogenic medical mariners. They nip in through the hole in my leg, travel up my thigh, navigate through the dark and stormy horrors of my pubic region and finally surface just above my diaphragm. There is then a spot of technical wizardry with lasers, photon torpedoes and a largish bit of sticking plaster. As long as that perfidious scumbag, Donald Pleasence, is kept out of the picture, I should survive.

Aside from the very, very slight possibility of dying young(ish), the only trouble with having an NHS operation is that one spends an unconscionably long time hanging about in garish neon-lit waiting rooms filling in forms. For most people, this doesn’t seem to be a problem; they scribble away for a few minutes then returns to the dubious delights of battered copies of Badger Hunting Life or Caravan Owing Fly Fishers’ Monthly. For those of a more ruminative literary-philosophical bent, the forms, coupled with the excessive amount of time one has on one’s hands to complete them, present something of a challenge and – let's admit it – an irresistible temptation.

It is with third question that I first stumble. Ethnicity? I scribble “Mainly Jewish” then pause for thought. I would willingly lay down my life for Israel and hate to admit this but, despite my mother’s laudably sentimental claims, I might not be technically Jewish. It is true that my grandfather rather looked the part but he had a brother called Rollo and did give my mother and uncles exceedingly odd names for putative Semites in the 1920’s (Clare, Eric & Frederic). I make the first modification to my answer: “Possibly part Jewish – maybe of Viking extraction”.

Then, there is the ethnicity my father’s side. His mother went by the name of Morfee (there was an accent in there somewhere) and, despite being a fervent Catholic, she claimed to be of Huguenot descent. However, I strongly suspect that she was really called Murphy and was of entirely Irish extraction.

There is more ethnic certainty on my paternal grandfather’s side. They came from North Devon and were smugglers, wreckers and utter bastards. One had been hung, drawn & quartered for following the family business; another, the infamous and deeply cretinous Edward Squire, suffered the same fate for attempting to poison Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth I via their rectums. Doubtless I should fill you in on the Tale of the Notoriously Inept Bottom Poisoner, but I digress.

I finally decide that my ethnicity is “Possibly part Jewish – maybe of Viking extraction with pseudo- Huguenot probably Celtic undertones”. I support this with copious marginalia explaining that I might also have Iberian blood on account of much of the Armada being wrecked off the Irish coast and that I have always felt very Roman (Note: when I tell the receptionist that I think I might be the reincarnation of Nero and ask if this could have some bearing on my ethnicity, she gazes at me with an expression that is several degrees colder than friendly). I decide against mentioning the Celtic-Phoenician theory as this is, after all, merely an NHS questionnaire and no place for excessive prolixity.

Ethnicity out of the way, I move on to religion. This is not quite as tricky as one might think. I shove in “Lapsed Satanist; now wavering between non-Ontological Theism & Humanism” and put in a footnote (cf. Martin Buber and the later Wittgenstein). In fact, by this point there are so many annotations and footnotes on the forms that I have to ask the quite surly receptionist for a continuation sheet.

There are a few tricky questions. For instance, I wasn’t sure if snuff should be classed as a ‘recreational drug’. The receptionist wasn’t especially helpful when asked. First, she tried to ignore me and when I persisted said in an offhand manner “I have never really considered the matter”. I started to get the impression that she somehow found it in her heart to dislike me.

The minutes pass cheerfully and productively. I finally reach the penultimate question: “Is there any possibility that you might be pregnant?” Disdaining the paltry little tick boxes, I scrawl “Every possibility” then thinking this a mite brusque I add “Consider the power of the Paraclete”. A moment’s consideration has me worrying that they might think I am some kind of religious nut so I beg another sheet of paper from the exceptionally bad tempered receptionist. I pen a few paragraphs explaining why, as a middle aged man, I’d be more than moderately surprised if I were pregnant but that I couldn’t entirely discount the possibility. As a preamble, I discuss the possibility of surreptitious divine or extra-terrestrial surgical intervention. I then move on to the distinction between belief and knowledge. I conclude by presenting what I trust is a lively rehearsal of Cartesian scepticism and epistemology.

The questionnaire complete, I proudly hand it to the by now furious-looking receptionist remarking that she has really got her money’s worth this time. “You do realise that someone is going to have to type this lot into the computer” is her ungrateful response. I express the hope that she will find it illuminating and return to my book, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

A Touch of the Outré

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I’ve just been giving some advice on what I call the psychoimagistics of ‘business chic’. Despite the credit crunch, this involves far more than being well groomed and smartly dressed. It also involves carrying certain talismanic objects and carefully deploying them at meetings. The magical objects can include:

• A leather portfolio
• A luxury pen
• A voice recorder
• A tablet PC
• A BlackBerry or other smart, email-enabled business phone
• A Moleskine, Red & Black or similar upmarket notebook

Of course, it is essential that you interact smoothly and professionally with the objects. There must be no fumbling with the laptop’s controls or finding your Mont Blanc is out of ink or the recorder out of batteries. In this as in so many other areas of life, one must strive for graceful elegance and eschew clumsy cackhandedness.

You are not simply marking out your territory and seizing control of part of the meeting space; nor are you just displaying symbols of your success, although this is important and, hence, the need for luxury items; you are showing your mastery of the world of business. The idea is to imply techno-efficiency and that you are wired into the Zeitgeist.

Thus far so good, but you need to go a step further. You also need to transcend the talismans and to display a certain disdainful aloofness from mere business gadgetry and processes. In psychodynamic or - as I prefer - psychoimagistic terms, you need one distinctive mark of personality or even of mild eccentricity – a tiny touch of the outré.

This touch is a restrained and subtle gesture towards a subversion of the talismanic world, or microcosm, you have yourself generated. The touch can be a carefully cultivated insouciance but more generally will be a negatively charged talisman. We are not talking vulgarity here. No comical socks, cartoon ties or – heaven forbid – tattoos. An elegant silk bow tie or expensive pocket watch might suffice for a man; a slightly over-the-top pair of glasses for a woman. Another option might be to ‘accidently’ display a magazine or book on some slightly recherché subject.

For some unfathomable reason, my sister had an uncontrollable fit of the giggles at this point. Reflecting bitterly that a prophet is rarely revered in his own country, I took a thoughtful snort of snuff, dusted the spillage from my well-worn yet chic combat vest and gathered my coffee besmirched index cards. I wonder if I should offer up-market courses in business deportment & style. I might follow in the steps of such luminaries as Professor Cosmo Saltana and Dr Owen Tuby. My time might finally have come!

The Thing that Slavered in the Night

I

It is 1.30 AM on Sunday morning. The young policeman approaching Angel Lane notices a bright light coming from the garden of the house at the corner. He strolls over to investigate. It has been an easy but long shift and he is doubtless looking forward to a cup of tea at the station; he is not prepared for the Boschean scene that is to shortly confront him. How could he be? Demonology is not currently on the curriculum at Hendon Police College.

The garden shows every trace of a savage mortal struggle. Pots and chairs are upturned; soil and garbage are strewn everywhere. The policeman glances down and just behind the wall sees a grotesque vision straight from the deepest pit of medieval hell: a monstrous squat toad-like form is frenziedly fighting with a large black shape. The shape appears inert – perhaps it has been subdued and is being consumed by the foul slavering toad. A lurid bluish light is blazing from the malevolent creature’s mouth. Its eyes are wild and the flesh on its forelegs a livid reptilian white.

As his eyes adjust to the crepuscular light, the policeman notices that the thing’s head is crowned with a mane of unkempt dishevelled hair. With a gasp of sheer horror he realizes that it may once have been human.

II

Late the previous evening, there had been an almighty rumpus outside my house. Things were being chucked about, somebody or some thing was snorting loudly and – most alarming of all – there was a weird scraping noise as though a knife were being sharpened on the patio. Screaming bellicose war cries and armed with a large bacon knuckle (handy weapon plus welcome source of sustenance in the event of a protracted struggle), I shot out of the house to confront the intruder, which turned out to be a large and extremely surprised badger. The badger fled & I contemplated my wrecked garden.

An hour or so later, I was outside the house again stuffing the detritus wildly into a huge black plastic waste bag. Suspecting badgers to be carriers of a whole host of foul diseases and to have absolutely lethal saliva – to my mind they were the mammalian equivalents of komodo dragons – I was suitably clad. Aside from my habitual and exceedingly tasteful green combat vest, I was wearing a pair of latex surgical gloves and griping a high-powered torch between my teeth. As there was little chance the badger would return, I had consumed the bacon washing it down with a litre or so of claret. After all, I had a hard dirty job to do.

“Good evening, Sir” said an authoritative if nervous voice just above my head.

III

I gaze up at the tall uniformed figure above me. Unwilling at first to relinquish the torch gripped in my teeth, I gargle “harrow” back. My voice sounds somewhat like that of a Tellituby. Dimly aware that the situation might look a trifle suspicious and that the policeman appears strangely agitated, I remove the torch and provide a more compendious albeit slurred explanation: “Buggery badger”.

“I see”, says the policeman, very, very slowly. He steps backwards doubtless wondering whether to draw his truncheon or whether the wiser course would be to summon armed assistance. We gaze at each other for a while. There is a pregnant pause.

IV

The policeman eventually continued his journey to the police station but not without a number of deeply suspicious backward glances. Deciding that my repairs to the garden would suffice, I retired inside to finish the wine. It had been a somewhat unusual but not entirely unsatisfying evening.

In Praise of Hackwork

It is all very well trying to maintain standards, but as life gets increasingly busy, it is difficult to find the couple of hours needed to produce a polished blog. The trouble is that there are things that need to be said, moans that need to be voiced and whimsies that must be aired.

So it’s farewell Emily Dickinson and away with the two inches of ivory. Hello digital Grub Street.

Footprints in the Salts of Time

It is five in the morning, it is absolutely bloody freezing, there’s this horrible white pile on the floor and I just know that I am in serious trouble. No one will believe the truth that the tin of Andrews took on a malevolent life of its own; it simply flew out of my shaking hands and deposited its entire contents onto the floor. They might impute that I was somehow to blame in not concentrating fully on the matter at hand. I never see the justice of this – who wants to devote 100% of their attention to dull mundane things when they can be thinking of higher culture, art, metaphysical philosophy or, in this particular case, the lovely Cote de Pablo?

When the gleaming white pile first appeared on the floor, when it manifested itself as it were (note the lack of human agency in all this – I’m working on the case for my defence), my first thought was that there must be some kind of tool to deal with situations of this sort. Actually, that’s not quite true. My very first thought was “Isn’t that interesting?” On stepping out of the heap of liver salts, I left behind two clearly defined footprints with a rather elegant symmetrical kind of blast pattern around them. At the edges there were what resembled vapour trails or, perhaps, those very fine, wispy clouds you get just before a typhoon. The thing was a bit Rothko-ish and vaguely reminiscent of the cover of a copy of Robinson Crusoe I once had. I was quite tempted to take a few photographs, but time was pressing and it was simply too cold.

Back to practicalities and domestic implements (neither my strong suit). The hoover was the obvious weapon of choice but was entirely out of the question as it would have woken up my wife. Besides, it might have been dangerous; liver salts are quite volatile and who knows what horrors might be unleashed if they became moist in the confined inner compartment of a vacuum cleaner. It doesn’t bear thinking about really.

A dustpan and brush then sprang to mind. I’ve rarely if ever actually handled one, but it seemed the thing to use on such occasions. However, being somewhat less than familiar with the contents of the tool cupboard, I opted for large broom and set to work.

The problem then was whether to concentrate the pile in order to somehow gather it up or to try to dissipate it evenly across the floor. The latter approach seemed the more appropriate to the white-pile exigency. It avoided the need for a gathering operation – the stuff would simply gather itself in the daily kitchen comings and goings – and I’d be back in bed in no time. There also seemed a poetic justice in this. After all, given that the stuff’s being on the floor wasn’t really my fault , it was only right that it should assist in the process of clearing itself up.

It transpires that spreading liver salts evenly across a kitchen floor is not a very sensible thing to do. It is somehow both sticky and crunchy. An interesting tactile effect from an aesthetic point of view; but bound to get me into even more trouble. My next ploy was to reconstruct the stuff into a more concentrated heap and hide it near the skirting boards so that I could discretely hoover it up later. The snag was that the skirting boards are painted a dark brown and the reconstituted heap was a still gleaming white. I tried camouflaging it with a thin layer of coffee powder, but started to feel a mite guilty. There was a nasty element of deception in all this and it was – albeit unjustly – my mess.

It is now six in the morning and it is still bloody freezing. I have spent the last half hour transferring the salts into an ashtray, pinch by pinch. Time is pressing, hypothermia surely setting in and the pile doesn’t seem a whole lot smaller. Perhaps if I used the broom to spread the remaining stuff evenly round the corners of the room it wouldn’t be noticed?