Category: Uncategorized

On the days when I fumble over the existence of God, the one our father told my brother and I about growing up, when the picture painted by that big floppy book I was given on my first communion comes across on the tenuous side, I reach for another slightly bigger floppy book, cast my eyes over the pages and feel the removal of all doubt wash over my mind in a wave of clarity.

God is Bill Watterson.

God wrote Calvin & Hobbes over a decade from 1985 to 1995. By the time he finished it was in 3,600 newspapers around the world and his book sales around the 50million mark. Nevertheless God was a hermit, never went to collect any of the awards he won, rarely did any press, content to merely sit at home at his drawing board and paint a picture of the world as seen through the eyes of a six year old and his imaginary stuffed tiger. Google him and you’ll find one photo of him. One. The only one that exists.

You don’t see Calvin & Hobbes dolls, or calendars, or films because God turned down literally millions of dollars in merchandising and tv rights, insisting his creation should remain only in its original format. The syndicate that owned all his rights were so pissed at this potential source of revenue squandered, that they considered firing him and getting someone else to write the comic in his place. The problem being the only person in the whole world who could do that job was… God. So they relented, million-less, and let him carry on.


But as time wore on God became more and more disillusioned by the powers that be. Where the comic had been always so full of life and enchantment and childhood innocence, day by day it was taking on a more cynical tone.

I don’t even understand some of the later ones.

In July of 1995 he announced he would be stopping Calvin & Hobbes at the end of that year. It was a bombshell. Millions of families, children and parents alike, feared the apocalypse of their breakfast reading rituals. The news was unfathomable, the equivalent of Messi announcing his retirement, uninjured, playing the best football of his life, aged 27.


As Christmas of that year went by, a time when Calvin would usually embark on his standard yuletide morality crisis of trying to secure as much sweet loot as possible while still lobbing snowballs at his neighbour, God chose instead to have a dig at the season’s mindless consumerism.

Christmas rolled towards New Year and fans all over were getting tetchy, it was squeaky bum-time. How would it all end. What famous last words would the world be left with. How would God distill all he had dedicated the last decade of his life to, into one last hurrah.  New Year’s Eve was the last strip. Falling fittingly on a Sunday, God had an entire half page to play with.


I think it ranks alongside the greatest parting shots in all of art. The Last Judgement on the wall of the Sistene, the last sentence of 100 Years Of Solitude, Red walking down the beach at the end of Shawshank, Rocky’s speech to a stadium of Soviets post taking out Ivan Drago in the 12th.

Every time I read it, it makes me smile.

And just like that… he was gone.

Ending in the only way possible. With a new beginning.

In one of the great scenes in GoodFellas Henry Hill, Tommy DeVito, Tony Stacks, Frankie Carbone and a few others are sat round the table in The Bamboo Lounge, drinking. Tommy is recounting getting a beat down administered to him by the feds and has the rest of the table in stitches. He finishes his story and Henry, in between hysterics, tells him what a funny guy he is.

What you mean I’m funny?


In the blinking of an eye the mood switches.

Funny how? What’s funny about it? Am I a clown? I make you laugh?


Am I hear to fucken amuse you?


It’s just the way you tell the story, Henry protests. It’s…. funny.

*

It’s just the way you tell the story.

I had the uncomfortable realisation a few years back that my delivery did not match my content. I wanted to be Tommy, the guy at the table in the middle of it all, with the crew on tenterhooks, hanging off my every word. But it wasn’t happening for me. I had good stories, but my delivery was featherweight. Anecdotes that should’ve brought the house down were floundering mid-sentence, the stress was wrong, the punchlines misplaced, and around me the attention waned.


Maybe it’s just not my medium, I thought lying in the dark one night staring up at the ceiling. I’m no comedian. Deal with it. But strangely enough I also noticed some of my funniest friends couldn’t write if their lives depended on it. And I felt my mood lighten. So if I wrote it down, I thought, I did have delivery.


Below is my best story. Since I can’t tell it all that well, I figured I’d write the hell out of it.

*

Some time back in the noughties my brother and I found ourselves on Shaftesbury Avenue a little bit past midnight, having just been to a gig in the West End, waiting for the night bus to take us home from Piccadilly. Just by the bus stop, opposite the old Trocadero which is now a fancy cinema, stands one of those late night pizza takeaway outlets.


Both peckish and with no bus in sight, my brother thought it’d be a touch to get a pizza for the ride home. By the time we’d paid the number 19 was upon us, and pizza box in hand, we headed up to the top deck to soak in the panoramic backdrop of a twinkling London night as we gorged.

We made quick work of the first two slices as the Routemaster trundled along Piccadilly and down the hill towards Hyde Park Corner. It was a hot summer night and I opened one of the small windows to let some air in, weary of stinking out the top deck with the smell of pepperoni. After the third slice our greed showed signs of waning, and by the time we reached the Kings Road our stomachs were signalling that all down there was tip-top, and maybe even in danger of tipping over.


Chelsea’s main artery lay empty. As the night bus rattled down it ramping up to speeds it could only have dreamt of whilst paralysed in daytime traffic, a last lonely slice of tepid double pepperoni lay languishing in the corner of the box, and my brother offered it to me. I’m done, I said. What happened next follows such a strange turn of events that it needs to be broken down into stages and relayed in the present tense.

T U R N  o f  E V E N T S

1. Displaying a logic that to this day I struggle to comprehend, my brother gathers up the slice of pizza, and showing a snap of the wrist familiar only to ardent frisbee enthusiasts, launches it out of the window of the moving bus.


2. I follow the trajectory of the pizza backwards as it flies through the night sky away from us, pulled downwards all the while by its gravity.


3. A man is standing by a lamp post just outside the big Marks & Spencer.


4. The pizza’s odyssey through the night sky comes to an end and finds a resting place, slapping hard against it, sticking to it.


5. That resting place is the man’s face.


6. Signals begin to forge a path from my retina along my optic nerve in the direction of my visual cortex, and the realisation of what exactly has just happened begins to dawn on me.

*

You know those high-speed trains that scare the life out of you as they careen through train stations with no intention of stopping. Imagine if laughter was said-station. And if laughter was such a station, then watching a man getting slapped in the face by a slice of pizza thrown from the window of a moving bus was that high-speed train. This juggernaut wasn’t stopping at laughter. It was never going to stop there. Whatever was going on in my brain, laughter was an insufficient way of processing what had just taken place.

*

7. In a split second I went from perception to computation, leapfrogging laughter like evolution had never cared to dream it up, and something else happened, something deeper and more meaningful.


8. I shat myself.

9. Aggressively.


10. Then and there, sitting on top of that night bus on that balmy evening of late summer, as a tide of heat began to move across the seat under me, my life took a strange turn.


My brother, who had been oblivious to the world since launching the pizza out of the window only seconds before, looked at the expression on my face and asked me what the hell was up. I don’t remember what I replied. I remember the feeling that washed over me as the smell of pepperoni on the top-deck was usurped by a different one. I remember the last four stops on the route 19 taking ten lifetimes. I remember the five minute walk back from the bus-stop that became a fifteen minute improvised shuffle. I remember tears in the shower, binning my favourite Y-fronts, I remember going to bed with the light on. I left a part of me behind on that bus.

I want to be clear. There’s the expression I pissed myself laughing or at a stretch that was so funny I shat my pants. But what happened didn’t happen because I laughed so hard. There was no laughter. The pizza hit the guy in the face, my eyes opened very wide for a split-second as I harnessed all the visual information I could, and I straight-up soiled myself. No sound came out of my mouth.


I want to speak to a doctor about this. Can things be so funny that your central nervous system encounters system overload, and you lose control of your insides so totally that your only recourse is to shit yourself. Evolution has a reason for everything.

*

There it is. That’s the story.

I have one about cycling into the Regent’s canal not on purpose, but the night bus story tops canal-gate. If I practiced the hell out of it maybe I’d be able to tell it incredibly, I’d be Tommy in the Bamboo Lounge, the life and soul of the room. But I figure you either have it or you don’t. Practicing it to death would probably make it come across forced anyhow, so I’ll leave it written.


I’ll be fine, I tell myself. I’ll sit back in the corner, one of the guys, listening and laughing as the cat with all the stories holds court, and in the pause that follows the last laugh I’ll think to myself hey I have one of those, maybe I’ll even tell it one day. But not right now. Not this minute. I’ll keep it for me, for my ears only. The greatest story never told.

Yesterday was Easter Sunday. As far as how to pass the day in question, I lay somewhere in a No Man’s Land between spending the day in church and flatlining on Dairy Milk. My Catholic Guilt has been dimmed of late, and I chose to spend the morning cycling around north London. It was a spring morning of piercing sunshine, the city was empty, the few people in the street strolled at half-pace and clocked each other in solidarity, as if we were the chosen guardians of our capital. A good morning to be alive.

Either to cultivate an allure of mystery or perhaps as a coping mechanism to avoid rejection, I’ve trained myself to be pretty self-sufficient in my own company. So it was strange to me that after a couple of hours of cycling around like this, I got a physical urge to be with someone. This could have been something to do with the day. Like Christmas, Easter is a time for being together. And on days characterised by their togetherness, those on the fringes are rightly so even more lonely than normal.


As late morning morphed into pre-lunch the streets got busier, the demographic became by-turn tourists in large groups or couples pulled lazily along by gently-swinging arms and interlinking fingers. And those on their own became more conspicuous by their aloneness. As I wheeled my bike through Covent Garden faintly beating the drum of my own self-containment, it dawned on me that this feeling of loneliness couldn’t so well be explained by the date in question, so much as the day.

This wasn’t an Easter thing, but a Sunday thing.

I came to a realisation. Sundays are the Holy Grail of a good life. If you’re living your Sundays well, you’re doing something right. If you wake up on Sunday morning with a childlike excitement as to what you’re going to do that day, you’re doing something right. If you manage to bed down on Sunday night with just enough satisfaction about the day you’ve had to distract you from the abyss of the coming week, you’re doing something right. Apply both of these feelings to life in general, and you realise Sundays are microcosm of life itself.

Whatever is going on in your week, more often than not Sunday is a day you mark off to indulge in you. In a time when so many people can’t wait to get to the back-end of Friday, the early part of the weekend seems to be made up of letting off the requisite steam. And so Sunday becomes the only day when we calmly get to do some actual living. The day for doing the things we love, that we never get the time to do otherwise. There can’t be a feeling quite as dank in life as nearing the end of a squandered Sunday. Sunday is the day for loving the hell out of ourselves.


If you’re spending your Sundays recovering from a need to forget the shittiness of life by getting royally screwed up most weekends, odds-on you’re compensating for something. Sundays don’t need to smash it the night before. Sundays dig the fresh continental-breakfast vibe. Sundays crack open the papers with the intention of not missing a single page. They read an article to the end they’re not even interested in. That’s how much Sundays love themselves.

The thing about Sundays is that they don’t need highs. They’ve seen enough of life to know that contentment isn’t a high, but a lonngterm removal of lows. Not an endless excitement so much as the skill of minimising the list of things that are worrying you.


My Sunday started well but petered out into something very sad. I ended up getting tired and going home around 4pm, then got myself involved in a YouTube marathon which lasted til around 6pm. I roused myself, went for a walk to Tesco, came back and fell asleep listening to the radio without having supper. I woke up around 11pm fully clothed and disorientated, ate some cheese and an apple and went to bed. It wasn’t quite the Sunday I’d been holding out for.

*

Some old Greek guy once said:


 Eating and drinking alone is the life of a lion or a wolf.

I don’t totally agree with him, but I think what he was alluding to was that all-in-all, humans are better off doing things together. And wheeling my bike alone through the city on that morning of piercing sunshine, breathing in the expectation the air is so thick with on sunny-days of springtime, I realised that I’d prefer to be doing whatever I might be doing, with someone. And this is what Sundays serve up on a plate so perfectly. The opportunity to kick back and do whatever it is you truly love doing, and indulge in it in someone else’s company.


Not wanting to be anywhere else, doing anything else, with anyone else. So if we haven’t already, we need to find a person we’d like to spend our Sundays with, and start spending our Sundays with them.

When people palm films off saying literally nothing happens, those are my favourite types of films.


Someone said that to me recently about The Revenant, which I thought was the heaviest film I’d seen in ages. Same goes for American Honey, which you could say plot-wise was a bit thin, just a bunch of kids road-tripping through America, but its study of characters is beautiful. You won’t get an angry 16ft green guy punching through a brick wall, just a close-up of a face staring out of a car window. On paper nothing is happening, but you could also say everything is.

I saw a film called Paterson last week. It was great.


Nothing happens.

It’s about a guy called Paterson, who lives in a town called Paterson, through which he drives a local bus, and observes all the life around him and writes poems in a notebook which he always keeps by his side. He has an over-bearing artsy girlfriend who to her credit is always telling him how good his poems are, and persuading him to make copies of them and send them off to publishers. Which he says he will but never gets round to. Most of the film is made up of him, staring into space, writing these poems in his notebook.

She has a bulldog which he hates, that he takes for walks every evening.

One day they go out to dinner, and come back to the house and his notebook has been ripped into a thousand tiny pieces by the bulldog. All his poems, gone. Months and months of poems, years probably, chewed to pieces by the mandibles of some dumb dog.

Paterson being Paterson takes it pretty chill on the surface, doesn’t say much at all, rides it out. But you can tell it has messed him up. He goes to work the next day, does his shift, impassively, trying to digest the loss, but not being able to. He just looks confused. The next day after work, he goes and sits down on a bench looking out onto his favourite scene, a waterfall by a railway bridge. The place where he’d normally get his book out and write. But this time he just sits. And looks.


After a bit, this random Japanese guy comes up and sits down next to him. He’s on a pilgrimage from Japan to the birthplace of William Carlos Williams, the famous poet born in Paterson who wrote that well-known I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox poem. They get into a stilted conversation.

The Japanese guy asks him if he knows William Carlos Williams personally. Paterson smiles and says no. The Japanese guy explains that he himself is a poet. Then the Japanese guy asks him if perhaps he, Paterson, is a poet.

Paterson looks into the middle distance, and after a long pause, says no.


Just a bus driver, he says.

The Japanese man nods. Then he gets up. As he walks off, he turns and reaches into his bag and gets something out. In japan we have a proverb, with every blank page, an opportunity he says. And hands him this beautifully bound Japanese notebook. You see Paterson opening it, and carefully leafing through the crisp empty pages. He looks up again and the Japanese man is gone.


He sits there, thinking. Then after a bit, you see him feel around in his pocket for a pen, which is there where he last left it. He gets it out, looks at the notebook, and after an age, he looks up, into the air, furrows his brow, and begins to write the words of a new poem. It’s pretty much the last scene in the film.

*

Somehow that last scene in the blinking of 12 seconds succeeded in giving sense to the whole two hours. And in a way I can’t explain, it hit me for six and I only eventually came to, well after the credits had rolled and the lights had come up and the guy in the cap with the bin-liner had been prodding me for over a minute, slumped as I was horizontally in row C with a blood-curdling gurn branded across my face. The film affected me.


Nothing I can write will give the full impact of watching it, but it was like a parable, a very subtle way of saying life goes on. Which for some reason I feel is one of the saddest ideas around, considering the context in which it is ever brought up. Bleugh. I don’t like it at all.


And in films and music it is a well-trodden theme. But the way in which Jim Jarmusch the director, dealt with it, through this story of a guy losing all his poems, all the meaning he gave to life, and then chance coming straight out of left-field, bringing with it a new dawn, and him having a little think, and starting over, and writing the first line of a new poem. I loved it.

All those hundreds of poems lost, and mourned and put to bed.


And then starting again from scratch.


What other choice do you have.

The idea that what matters only is going forward.


What you make, from now.

*

From now.

Things I learnt once upon a time when I worked in an office.

1. The degree with which people listen to each other in an office base-jumps off a cliff–face from the level of meaningful interaction one would expect or demand from a friendship outside of work. No-one really listens to each other. They wait to interject with information that applies to them, and loosely to the conversation in hand.


2. The Monday-morning paradigm:


i) Monday mornings are not shit.

ii) Imagine a Monday morning is like the wave in the last scene of The Perfect Storm. The office on a Monday morning is a flotation device which if you manage to swim out to, will save your life. All you need to do is grab hold of this flotation device and hold on for dear life. You don’t actually have to do any work, you just have to sit there with your arms wrapped around said-flotation device, until around 6pm where the flotation device will have miraculously led you to calmer waters, at which point you can let go of it when nobody is looking and doggy-paddle to shore.


iii) This could potentially happen again on Tuesday and Wednesday, depending on a) how big your weekend was and b) how menial your workload is.


3. The reason office parties are so mental is because everyone is so long that the only conceivable way to have a good time is to get absolutely shitted.

4. Not true, it’s because they’re free.

5. Also not true. It must be because you spend so long together in one place doing one specific thing, the chance to do the polar opposite together in a completely different place is pretty fucking unbelievable, and grounds enough for aggressive armageddon.


6. All three of the above must be a bit true.


7. The office environment has more politicking and beef than an especially lairy episode of Judge Judy.

8. Familiarity breeds attraction. Girls you wouldn’t really clock in the street become megaliths of sexual potency in the office environment. Perhaps the same happens the other way around. I don’t know I’m not a girl.


9. The people you like least on your first day are the ones who become the biggest legends, the ones you think show the biggest potential transpire to be the biggest a-holes.


10. As funny as the television show The Office undoubtedly was, like all great comedy it was also capable of oceanic-depths of philosophical insight. On the subject of the work environment, perhaps Tim said it best.

The people you work with, are just the people you were thrown together with. You don’t know them, it wasn’t your choice, and yet you spend more time with them than you do your friends or your family. But probably all you’ve got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for 8 hours a day.

*

If you compare the structure of an office environment versus the self-employment model, they are two sides of the same coin. The difference  could be described as that between passive and active, between giving and receiving. One involves being told what to do. The other involves telling yourself what to do. Some people like taking orders. Some don’t. Which is why they end up working for themselves. This is not to say one has more value than the other.

You can still do what you’re told to by a boss like a total boss.

One involves rolling the rock of your own confidence up a mountainside every day whilst maintaining self-autonomy, the other brings with it the sanctity of being a much-needed cog in a machine, without the freedom to stop turning until you’re told to. The pressure of disappointing people versus the pressure of being responsible for your own to–do list. When you mark your own homework there’s the potential to mark yourself down, or give yourself one gold star too many.

Some people leave their work at work. Some people take it home with them. Some people work from home. Some people’s home is their work. Some live to work. Some work to live. Some people talk about nothing but work. Some refuse to breathe a word of it. Some people’s best work comes to them in dreams, some work can be an unending nightmare. Some people get addicted to work. Some people get addicted because of it. Some people never work a day in their life. Some people’s work never feels like work. Some people never stop working. Some people work themselves six feet under.

Stephen Hawking once said…


Never give up work, it gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.


Dostoevsky deemed the definition of hell to be…


A man repeating a task day after day after day he sees absolutely no point in.


Whereas Ramson Badbonez was of the opinion that one should…


Fuck a nine to five where ma out on road money makurzzz.

What is this guy up to.

Looks suspect.

At first glance our man looks to be mid-anecdote, re-enacting the details of some sordid night straight out of the Weinstein back catalogue to his mates. But probing deeper into Google’s stock photography sheds some light on the matter. Turns out Cardigan Jim’s impression is no more than a bit of coughing on account of an unexpected bout of asthma, which is being soothed below by a hit from his inhaler.

Asthma affects 350 million people worldwide, and five million in this country. Three people die every day from it in the UK, it afflicted those as far back as Ancient Egypt, and doctors are yet to find a cure apart from preventative medicines called corticosteroids. Also known as asthma pumps. With this in mind it’s something to be taken pretty seriously. 

Only, I can’t .

Because asthma is the lamest thing on the planet.

*

I’ve had asthma for as long as I can remember. I may even have been born with it. As much as one eventually gets used to ones disabilities, having asthma has always been a lingering source of embarrassment. Not because it’s something to be ashamed of, but because it’s so fucking lame.


Asthma is the quiet guy in the room with not much to say wearing the most annoying T-shirt you’ve ever seen. If I had grounds to hate him I might like him more, at least I could react to him. But this guy is harmless, and yet his tee makes me want to overdose on antihistamene.

Some people have such bad asthma it takes over their life. I can almost forget about mine, but can’t. It sits there like an unused sub, not serious enough to demand my respect, never quite bad enough for me to live in fear of an attack, but bad enough that if I find something a bit too funny it could bring on a wheezing fit and getting an inhaler out is going to kill the vibe. Bad enough that if forget my Ventolin on a night out I have to go home to get it.

There are three cool things about asthma.

1. Google’s stock photography.

2. The urban myth that hitting your Ventolin eight times in a row can get you high.

3. Vlad The Inhaler.

It makes you friends in the same way that not getting picked for football makes you friends. Imagine a survival of the fittest situation, how long would a group of asthmatics last in an apocalypse. Who are you guys. We’re the asthma crew. What does that mean. We all have asthma. Every one of you? Yes. Okay, stay here. We’ll come back for you.

Asthma ruined my childhood. When everyone was on the floor during sleepovers I had to stay in the bed because of dust mites in the carpet, I had to stay on the boat when everyone went scuba-diving, and when I was six I had it so badly my parents had to carry round a syringe encased in its own special box like the one out of The Rock, so when I had an attack they’d pin me to the floor face-down, pull down my shorts, and inject a steroid into my backside.

But above all I think my problem with asthma stems from the fact I am a man. And as far as I can tell, asthma is the antithesis of manliness. It is an evolutionary sign of weakness.


I read somewhere that women are attracted to symmetry of features, to smell, to genes they know instinctively will continue a strong healthy bloodline. Basically not asthma. My experience is that pulling out an asthma inhaler on a first date doesn’t usually get you a second. Imagine a situation when you’re with a girl you’ve always fancied, and shit starts kicking off. How much are you really going to assuage her fears by gripping her shoulder and being like hold my Ventolin, I’ll handle this.

I’d go into how having an asthma attack in bed is the least smooth thing in the world, but the Daily Express have written a whole article about it.

When you have an asthma attack in flagrante and don’t get rushed to hospital, there’s something about the moment when you’re sitting at the edge of the bed, wheezing between hits on your inhaler, as a girl stands next to you and rubs your back and pretends to be concerned while she tries to process how physically and mentally unturned on she is, that stays in your mind for a while.

People say our vulnerabilities are what make us cool. I once wrote something about depression and the response I got was incredible. People said it was brave, and vital, some told me stories of their own experience.


I have a feeling this admission of my own asthma won’t kickstart the same kind of dialogue. Being depressed has a peculiar gravitas, it has a depth and a darkness which elicits concern and respect. Being asthmatic does none of this. Asthma is Darwinism in its most brutal form. It is being lame in the original sense. Someone to be weeded out, genes to be extirpated en route to the übermensch.

The worst thing about asthma is that it’s so psychological, it’s actually psychosomatic. So writing a whole post about asthma, obliging myself to think about it for a period of time, has actually given me asthma. Right now I’m pretty wheezy. Nothing in the world is less cool than that.

So… what you get up to this afternoon?


I had a self-induced asthma attack.


Jesus, what were you doing?


Just sitting at my computer for a couple of hours, writing.


Fucking hell, what were you writing about?


Base-jumping.

ADDENDUM

My mother just fired me some confusing feedback, an opinion founded on the one hand on seven decades of life-experience from a female perspective, and on the other I feel somewhat blinkered by a mother’s love.

There’s a romantic vulnerable side to it which turns some women on.

Why does this make me feel even worse.

This is a tale of addiction and loss.

Of decline and fall.

But also of redemption, of growth, of wisdom accrued through suffering.

It all started one Sunday afternoon a little over a month ago, when I got back from a long weekend away and opening the fridge in the relaxed perfunctory manner of a man who hadn’t done a shop in recent memory, spied a glowing sun nestling behind a couple of non-alcoholic beers and a Jazz apple, imbuing its cold environs with a golden warmth.

Almond milk was a mystery to me. The dregs of this carton formed part of my flatmate’s smug plans to make the ultimate bircher muesli. He wasn’t around, and last time I checked he was abroad somewhere, being smug, the kind of place where almond milk flows untapped from bountiful almond springs.

So I thought what the hell.

I took a sip. And as the liquid washed over my tongue, past my palate and cliff-dropped into my stomach, something happened. Sadly all three drops in there meant that not enough of it happened. I threw the carton in the bin, thinking not much more of it. But that night, vivid dreams of diving Scrooge McDuck style into pools of golden almonds and torrents of milky rivers flooded my somnolent brain.

I woke up in the morning sodden, and wandering over to the kitchen, froze, mid nut-scratch, as the carton of Almond Milk sat there staring back at me from the kitchen counter.

Weird, I thought.

These guys aren’t easy to locate. But the following Wednesday I went into my local Health Shop, the kind of place you have to stumble over two crates of chia seeds just to get through the door. Browsing constellations of products I’d never before laid eyes on, I finally located the right shelf, and with the self-satisfied grin of a man just texted back by his dealer, took the plunge.

I brought one back home, locked the door, stripped down into something more comfortable, took it, shook it, twisted the cap and long-armed half the carton.

Most people describe their first heroin experience as nothing particularly incredible. No obvious upperlike coke, no love-surge like pills or God-delusion like meth. Just a mellow life is okay after all moment. I wouldn’t know, but having taken my first hit of almond milk I’d say scratch that I definitely do.

I hit it again. And again. And before I knew it the carton was done, and I was legging it down the road in my Y-fronts to score some more.

When it comes to drugs there are gateway theories.

The idea is that weed leads to LSD or pills, onto coke, crack and then heroin. Something like that. But my own personal descent into hell went something like this.

Almond milk.

Worrying amounts of almond milk.

At around three quid a pop my new habit didn’t come cheap and greenbacks don’t grow on trees, so like all men who love a bargain but refuse to compromise on quality, I hit up M&S. I scoured the shelves, but no almond milk was to be found.

I did find… Oat Drink.

Jackpot. I real lingering semi-sweet but not quite aftertaste, and with it the delusion it was a little bit good for you. What drug does that.

M&S Oat Drink was good. So I decided to sample more of their shit.

Coconut Drink.

Just like these two cats I’ve fallen foul of the allure of Coconut water in my time.

Could coconut milk do the same? I had to say I was worried about the coke to crack effect.

My fears were unfounded, Coconut milk is disgusting. It’s an embarrassment to the whole non-milk milk scene. I’m not sure I took more than one sip before head-butting the carton in a show of raw uncut contempt. It exploded all over my face and dripped down into a huge puddle of coconut milk which began seeping across the supermarket floor.

But M&S did have… Rice Drink.

That’s when things got really weird.

That’s when I stopped seeing people. 

I took Keith Richard’s advice about the purity of the drugs you take, sacked off M&S and went back to the Mother Ship. Rude Health. Accept no substitutes. As fiercely addictive as Brown Rice Drink is, it’s more of a party drug rather than an every day thing. And so I kept coming back to Almond. On heavier sessions I’d hit the Almond for hours, and then straight arm a Brown Rice to take the edge off.

Once I’d bought out the entire stock of E8, I made the mistake of straying into E5 one day and picked up a carton of this.

Don’t ever fuck with a milk product that has both Arabic and Chinese on it and expires in December 2027.

I decided to stock-pile with a view to dealing, to even up the books. But dealer’s discipline is learnt the hard way, and I spent the next 18 hours getting high on my own supply. The next four days passed by in a blur. Until finally, I came to, buttnaked, on the floor of my own bathroom, squealing like a newborn.

I was 4 stone heavier. I mean, last time I checked I wasn’t drinking six litres of full-fat milk a day.

*

This is as much a warning to others, as a sorry tale of loss of personal wealth and dignity. Steer well clear of these non-dairy milk substitutes. We’ve been milking cows for millennia, stick to the classics. Besides, I missed the most glaringly obvious point of all. They’re far too sweet anyway.

Hey, at least I can say I finally understand all of Pulp Fiction.

That thing right there, seeping out of the left-hand corner of her mouth…

… I always wondered what that was.

The Martian is fantastic.

There’s a scene near the end once Matt Damon’s character has come home to earth after spending a somewhat traumatic time on Mars, where he gives a speech at the Nasa space-centre to a room full of budding astronauts.

I saw the film first time round in the cinema and the speech hit me like an uppercut from a 145-pound Conor Mcgregor, but obviously since I’m not heavy into the pirate dvd scene I happened to not be recording it from the back of the auditorium on a tri-pod, and being unable to watch it back, the scene lingered instead long in my memory, until it slowly evanesced into a muddle of garbled sentences that made no sense. I searched for it on YouTube for a few months but in vain.

It was only when on the plane to New Zealand a few weeks back that I got a chance to watch it again.

Sitting there, breathing in the recirculated air and dreaming of the snack trolley, at last the scene in question came into view. And once again it was a total KO, giving me no option but to pass the hell out. It was only by dint of the 15 hot towels dutifully brought to me by the stewardess that I eventually came round, watching it a cool 68 more times before transcribing it onto my boarding pass.

*

When I was up there, stranded by myself, did I think I was going to die? Yes. Absolutely. And that’s what you need to know going in, because it’s going to happen to you. This is space. It does not cooperate. At some point, everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south, and you’re going to say.. this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that. Or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just.. begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one. And then the next. And if you solve enough problems you get to come home…

*

I think the words speak for themselves. But it’s not about space. It’s about every day of our lives. The myriad of tiny hurdles that emerge from each new day, and how the solving of these little problems ends up being the best portion of our lives. To roll the rock up the hillside every day. If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself, each day has enough trouble of its own.

It’s a reminder of the power of writing, and oratory, and of art in general. To transcend, and to say something well-trodden so well that it makes the subject matter new again. And you can’t but pay it attention. For those of you who find this all pretty unremarkable, I doff my cap, you’ve worked out a bunch of things that will take me a lifetime.

Cycling through the rain yesterday morning I saw a whole load of children in school uniform walking down the street, some languidly, some upbeat, some in sibling troupes, some chaperoned by parents, some in the company of just themselves. I couldn’t figure out why I was paying them attention, and realised it was because there hadn’t been any for what felt like ages. Casting his mind back to the early 90s Einstein does some maths and makes the connection. This must be the first day of term then.

Back to school yo.

I was like sheeeeeeeeed.

Remember what it was like going back to school after the life-time of summer holidays. It was a huge deal. The self-importance of being in a new year, itself with a new name. You couldn’t be the same cat. You had to have a new flex. Who had the new football boots. Who had the new haircut. Who had the new Sony walkman.


The assembly hall lined with newbies, scared shitless first-years styling out an alien universe you felt sorry for, but made feel even smaller because that’s what the older ones did to you back in the day, and now it was your turn. Which kid had broken his arm and was in a cast. Which kid had changed schools and wasn’t coming back. Which kid sat there, cross-legged, looking like a ghost, as the headmaster announced during the holidays his little sister had died of leukaemia.

Recently I got an old passport photo blown-up and framed and stuck it on my bathroom wall.

My thinking was if that little guy was looking down on me every time I reached for the Colgate, it would be a positive influence on my day to day. I don’t want to let that little guy down. Look at his innocent expression. He’s a good little guy. He used to burst into tears if he got in trouble, he used to share his chips in the canteen. He was brave, he had a big heart. He deserves good things.

The theory is working semi-well. When I’m in a bad mood I look up at him between gargles of Listerene and tell him to stop gazing moronically back at me, so wide-eyed and expectant. Quit piling on the pressure kid. It’s harder than it looks. But the missing piece of the jigsaw, the thing I really need, is one of those phone apps to render a photo of me and what i’m going to look like when i’m 75, if I ever make it that far. If I frame old man Domingo on the other side of the mirror, on his rocking chair, styling it out in his cardigan, I can have him looking down on me too. A life-time apart, they’ll have one thing in common.

They’ll both be saying don’t fuck this up for me.

But old man D will have edited the refrain slightly.

Calm down, I think he’ll be saying. It’s easier than it looks.

Over the course of a few weeks on this mental bike trip through America last month, me and my man Wilma went into a bunch of diners and shops and had direct experience with americans and their own brand of hospitality. More specifically their strange ability to get away with the sentence oh good morning to you sir… take care and you be sure to have an absolutely fantastic day okay? without sounding completely disingenuous.

An English person says that to you and you have two options. Leg it or punch them in the face. After being on the receiving end of a few of these mid-morning eulogies, we realised that was simply the American way of saying yo. Same way a Parisian would grunt at you. Same way the Japanese would bow. It’s all the same, just a different way of saying it.

I asked Wilma the question, would you rather people be really polite to you but not mean any of it, or people be monosyllabically screwface, but at least be genuine. Wilma opted for the French state of affairs, saying he’d prefer realness with a scowl, over a smile laced with deep-loathing.

I’d say it’s a tough one.

When I’m in a shitty mood a Parisian being Parisian has the ability to cleave my world in two. WhenI’m in a shitty mood I’d take any number of kowtows or sycophantic morning greetings even if they meant nothing. Because to me they’d mean something.

I’d say as we get older most of us opt for the genuine over the fake. We’d rather be in the company of the few people we connect with, than be surrounded and at the same time feel isolated. Like the old man in the Werther’s ad. He was happy heavy-chilling in just the company of his grandson, imparting all the wisdom of his years to the little man over a delicious sweet.

I bet he’d take that over a night down at the Bingo chatting gas to his crew, none of which have been able to hear anything since 1989. Then again, older people tend to suffer more from loneliness, and so they become less discriminatory over company. That’s why you catch them speaking in tongues holding up the queue in Tesco’s. They just want to be with people. But we’re all lonely. Achingly lonely. Every single one of us. One thing is proven though. What’s good for you and for me is better for me than what’s only good for me. So why don’t we all be nice to each other, and mean it.

I have no idea where i’m going with this.

Being homeless is not much fun.

This is Gabriel, who is homeless and bathes in the Los Angeles river when things get stinky.

I’m not that homeless, but when you’re between moves, pissed off with your parents, and your girlfriend is in the throes of those sorts of issues of temperament that come about roughly once a month and subtly infer you should get the hell out of her face, that pretty much qualifies you as without home.

And like i said it’s not much fun. Until now.


Enter the…


HOTEL IBIS EXCEL LONDON DOCKLANDS

A stone’s throw from the delightful Canning Town roundabout and only accessible by four lane motorway, the location leaves everything to be desired. But with three hours notice it remained the only place with a vacancy in east London, and weighing up the situation, seemed a superior option to hitting the streets or braving the lair of the aforementioned fire-breathing dragon.

And let’s be honest Ibis has a classy ring to it.

Two hour’s bike ride along motorway towpaths cutting through weird parts of London I didn’t even know existed got me to my destination. I breezed through the double doors and hit up reception with the nonchalance of somebody checking into a hotel, on his own, in his hometown, for no real reason. The place didn’t exactly ooze atmosphere, but I could tell things were just warming up.

The elevator stopped at the 8th floor, i stepped out, hooked a left and saw this.

DEJA-VU motherfucker.

Shit just got freaky.

I Usained it to my door and fumbling around with the keycard like a girl for two minutes I calmed down, summoned a milligram of coordination and finally got inside. There is nothing quite like the feeling of opening a door to a hotel room that you have booked, for yourself alone, in your own hometown, for no real reason.

All the mod-cons yo. Bathroom capsule with power-shower, tv with up-to-date adult movie selection, high-speed internet, sick mood lighting, no view whatsoever. My night was licked. I spent the next two hours doing all that shit you could never justify in a million years doing within the confines of your own home, but feels like the only shit you could possibly get up to within the environs of a hotel room.

When that got repetitive I spruced up and hit the hotel bar.


Things had not warmed up. Not even remotely.

I was certain the man left of centre in the blue shirt was either made of plastic or in rigor mortis. In the time it took me to work my way casually through two jars, he didn’t move once. Still, when in Rome.

As the cold gold inched its way slowly towards my dome it dawned on me that a lack of atmosphere that acute was severely endangering my health, and it suddenly made sense that the only guy in there was dead or made of plastic. So i got up, checked that the guy was actually plastic – he was dead – and braving the freaky corridor arrived back to the sanctity of my double-room. I spent the rest of my night nonchalantly watching the paralympics from the comfort of my polyester sheets.

Lincoln once said that good decisions make you feel good and bad decisions make you feel bad. The next morning, superbly well-rested and with a disturbingly wholesome spring in my step I bounded out of there feeling like the King Of The World. I can’t quite put my finger on what brought about this elation, but something tells me it’s that indefinable X-factor that is just simply trademark Ibis, the very same thing that made that place more than just a hotel, that made it a home away from home, and more than anything a home for the homeless.

The questionnaire says more than words ever could.

Ibis you’ll be in my heart always.

Next stop, loyalty card.