Ersatz Life & Moleskine Notebooks

…Notandum,
A Rat had gnawne my spur-lethers; notwithstanding,
I put on new, and did go forth: but, first,
I threw three beanes ouer the threshold. Item,
I went, and bought two tooth-pickes, whereof
one I burst, immediatly, in a discourse
With a dutch Merchant, about Ragion del stato.
From him, I went, and payd a moccinigo,
For peecing my silke stockings; by the way,
I cheapend sprats: and at St Markes, I vrin'd.

Sir Politic’s Diary from Ben Jonson’s Volpone.

As an angst-ridden 12-year old in the early 1970s, the things that fascinated me about my father’s copies of Diners Club Magazine – to be truthful, the only things that could have possibly fascinated any adolescent about that depressingly staid publication – were the incredibly rich vistas of full and important lives revealed through the glossy advertisements for luxury diaries and appointment books.

No buying toothpicks or urinating in St. Mark’s for those who wrote in these magnificent works. Gazing at the carefully staged photographs with same lubricious intensity as my contemporaries might have applied to the glossy yet curiously sticky pages of Penthouse International, Electronics Today or Super Car, I saw a clearly leather-bound tome, artistically placed at an oblique angle alongside a three-quarter full, cut crystal brandy balloon, a verdant tropical house plant, and an antique globe (doubtless a disguised drinks cabinet). An expensive, gold fountain pen lay carelessly athwart the open volume, a magician’s wand or rather Byzantine bishop’s staff blessing the life within. The tasteful cream vellum-like pages had beautiful entries in effortless copperplate:

• Flight to New York
• Meet Maurice for lunch (Hyatt)
• Flight Paris
• Meeting with President
• Dinner with Marie-Claire at ‘Les Deux Magots’

In comparison, my own Letts Schoolboy Diary was anything but sumptuous; in fact, it was a stomach-churning mess. The writing was execrable and the doodled drawings quite appalling even by schoolboy standards. Between its embossed blue plastic covers, the scrawled entries were frankly rather dull:

• Research history homework
• Write history essay

After the first month, I usually gave up on even bothering to tear off the clever little perforated corner tabs.

Was it that if one acquired a diary of such magnificent opulence as that shown in Diner’s Club Magazine, one’s life would somehow be forced to live up to it? You couldn’t just scribble in “4.00 PM Dentist” on such pages; surely you would have to enter “Appointment with Sir Clifford, Harley Street”. The diary would force you to live such a life; it would elevate your existence beyond the quotidian world of history homework to virtually Elysian heights. You might indeed be gathered into the “artifice of eternity” to sing if not of “what is past, or passing, or to come” at least of breakfast at the Café Royale and transatlantic flights. Childish, arse-about-face thoughts but ones that have haunted me – and it would appear, many others in a less consciously articulated form – ever since. My appeals for a leather-bound journal and matching, preferably onyx or Chinese lacquer, deluxe fountain pen falling on baffled but resolutely deaf parental ears, I had to bide my time.

A decade or so passed and I acquired a modest income, a wife, an untenured teaching position and – at long last – a Mont Blanc (a gift from a well-heeled student) together with a leather-clad diary. Now life might begin in earnest. I set to work:

• Prepare lecture on Donne
• Deliver lecture on Donne

Admittedly this was a slight improvement on my juvenile efforts, but with eight weeks of much the same entry, it did get a bit monotonous. Adding the occasional social entry didn’t help matters much. “Meet wife for noodles” sounded abysmally trite and utterly lacking in the glamour of the exciting meetings, dinners and trysts recorded in the advertisements.

It is possible that John Donne’s own appointment book would have been equally dull (“Knock off yet another divine poem”); but fortunately he wasn’t exposed to the Diner’s Club Magazine at a formative age. Come to think of it, even the great Immanuel Kant’s entries wouldn’t have been all that exciting. Day after day one would have found the same item: “Carry on with Critique of Pure Reason”. But then, of course, neither Donne nor Kant had any need to record the snail tracks leading to their “monuments of unaging intellect”; their works alone suffice to confer immortality.

The most depressing thing was that my appalling handwriting bore no resemblance to the elegant flourishes that had so impressed me. Indeed, it took an enormous effort of will to first put expensive pen to expensive paper, to sully the textured pages with my constipated scrawl. Having forced a few lines onto the page a malicious little voice in my head would mutter “Now you’ve gone and spoilt it”. And I really felt I had inadvertently performed a sacrilegious action; it would have been far better if I had left the wretched thing alone as a mute reproach to a life not in the least less ordinary. If “the medium is the message”, as Marshall McLuhan wrote – or nearly wrote – then this particular medium’s message was nothing if not unambiguous: keep off the parchment.

Computerised appointment books and eventually Microsoft Outlook saved me from this dispiriting state of affairs. Appearing in neat type on the computer screen, first in glowing green on black and then in full colour, my appointments might have been just as monotonously mundane, but they were no longer scrawled and they gained a kind of spurious authority from the hi-tech context. Plus, with the advent of ‘cut and paste’ one could fill the eight weeks of similar entries in an instant, rather than have to laboriously copying them in by hand while miserably dwelling on the amount of repetition.

And of course with the advancement of maturity and the arrival of fatherhood, one became less self-obsessed, less concerned with some invisible critic looking over one’s shoulder. Was some higher power judging me on the quality of entries in my diary or even on that of the physical object itself? I no longer gave a damn, or much of one. I was too busy enjoyably living my life without worrying about the agenda. Sure I keep a sort of desultory diary – but that is stored in computer files and is a record of what has happened acting as an aide memoire rather than as an exercise in calligraphically perfect self aggrandisement.

One would have thought that in our age of texts, emails, blogs and social networks, an immature anxiety about writing one’s agenda on quality paper with luxury pen would have gone the way of the quill, the stylus and the wax tablet. However, it appears that the obsession with creating a meaningful life through the mere possession of elegant writing materials is as alive as ever. Take, for example, the recent rebirth of the Moleskine notebook – available from all branches of Waterstones at the princely price of £8.95 for the diminutive standard pocket version. Take too, the number of blogs devoted to the thing. Filled with informative interactive discussions on such topics as what pen best suits them, how to care for the simulated moleskin jackets or what to put in the expandable inner pocket, these sites even have loving photos of the things, these to me being curiously redolent of those old Diner’s Club Magazine advertisements. Needless to say, I bought one the other day; I couldn’t have done otherwise. After all, the advertisement does point out that “Moleskine was the choice of Picasso, Hemingway and Chatwin”. The next stop, it would seem, is to be Patagonia.

Amsterdam

A weird conversation in the charmingly tatty Smokey’s Coffee Shop on Rembrandtplein:
Me: A coffee – espresso – please.
Barman [puzzled but cunning look]:
How special do you want your coffee?
Me [puzzled but even more cunning look]:
How special can you make it?

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy …

It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?" "
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately.”

If you wish to preserve any joy in life or any semblance of sanity, never even so much as contemplate helping Athenians with their Macs. I am still recovering from a session last night with my good friend, Yiannis, a man of such implacable moroseness of soul as to drive any would-be Zorba from dancing on the beach to the top of the nearest cliff. The session should have taken no more than 10 minutes as it merely involved adding a printer to my friend’s network; in the event, it seemed to drag on longer than any Greek tragedy.

The evening began with an utterly redundant pre-installation discussion, full of chain smoking, dark prognostications and obscure Hellenic obscenities. Macintosh engineers, it seems, are much given to self-abuse, which is doubtless the result of their dubious parentage. I suspect that the real cause of this bitterness is that one had the temerity to bill my friend for £400 for a visit (remarkably cheap, in my opinion if he had to experience an nth degree of what I went through).

I should have insisted that I be left alone with the machines; instead, not being at all familiar with the Macintosh operating system, I foolishly thought Yiannis might be of some use in finding things like the printers folder. However, as an especially god-cursed Greek, he appears incapable of accepting - far less following - simple instructions. For instance, when asked to print a document, he spent a good quarter of an hour expounding on a) why it probably wouldn’t work and the pointlessness of even trying and on b) his ‘little idea’ about what to do with a spare ethernet wire. Needless to say, after I finally lost patience and gave him a few little suggestions of my own as to what to do with the bloody wire, the document printed perfectly. This made him even gloomier and there was another protracted discussion session before I was allowed to try printing from the other machine. Of course, this worked too.

Instead of expressing any gratitude or the slightest hint of pleasure at my success or – as he would doubtless put it – my failure to fail, Yiannis's despair reached new depths, becoming almost palpable. I left him sitting in a dark despondent miasma examining the printouts for imperfections with the morbid intensity of a forensic scientist; the scene strangely evocative of that in the Oresteia where, to the accompaniment of Agamemnon’s dying screams, Cassandra contemplates her own imminent and exceedingly gruesome murder at the hands of the psychotically vengeful Clytemnestra.

Should any theatre director ever decide to put on an adaptation of Winnie the Pooh in the mode of Aeschylus or of Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle, I know exactly who should be cast as Eeyore.

Life - A Health Warning

Torbay Council officials said in a letter to Torbay's Chamber of Trade that the trees had sharp leaves which could injure people's eyes or faces.
But the council has denied it was "going health and safety mad"… (BBC Report)

Here is yet more evidence of ‘health and safety’ timidity. Having discovered the potentially lethal dangers posed by palm tree leaves, Torbay council is not even contemplating an outright ban. Nor is it is prepared to face up to the other life-threatening hazards facing unsuspecting visitors to the resort.

First, despite the clear danger of slip-related injuries or of self-induced hypothermia, there are no health notices on ice cream cones. Nor is the ice cream ‘user’ provided with a complete list of its constituents upon purchase. Just as food purveyors are obliged to provide the information that ham sandwiches may contain meat traces, so vanilla ice cream should have a label attached with the advice that it may be unsuitable for people with allergies to vanilla.

Second, there has been absolutely no attempt to address the problem of the large quantities of sand that surround the resort. Moves should be made to immediately set up ‘sand in the eye’ treatment centres on all beaches together with medical personnel trained in the treatment of psychological traumas induced by getting sand in swimsuits. The long term goal should, of course, be the removal of the substance from the beaches. An alternative might be to cover the beaches with a protective layer of concrete or with industrial-grade latex.

As a short-term measure, beach users should be issued with, and required to wear bio-hazard suits. They should also be obliged to sign disclaimers explicitly stating that Torbay Council will not be held liable for sand- or splash-induced injuries.

Finally, signs should be set up on all beaches warning users that if they go in the sea they may die. These signs should be at least 50 feet high and should feature graphic depictions of drowned corpses, bloated body parts and shark-induced injuries.

If Torbay Council shows the courage of its convictions, the resort will be transformed into a healthier, safer and far emptier place.

Post hoc, ergo prompter hoc

After you set up our database, the cat got sick and the fridge stopped working

The above might be a slight exaggeration, but the level of rationality is about the same as that shown in the typical support calls I receive. For example, I came home on Friday after a long, hot day on the road to find an urgent message. It seems that there has been a sudden change on a system which means that whenever they open a database, Word files on a different machine inexplicably vanish. Despite my attempts at an explanation, the poor customer simply couldn’t grasp the fact that there was no possible connection between the system and the missing files.

Another case was a lady who insisted that a programme I had written had adversely affected the volume of her telephone calls. “All I can say is that since you installed that thing, I can’t hear a word anyone says,” she grumbled. This was all the more bizarre because the computer in question was not even connected to the phone line. Fortunately, I was able to avoid a visit by demanding that she had an engineer inspect the plumbing first to see if that had been affected too.