Author: Domingo Cullen

A Guide To Continental Iced Coffee

Travel broadens the mind.

More importantly bike travel through Europe precipitates many a petrol station pitstop, and with this an unrivalled opportunity to sample a crapload of variations on the world’s most accomplished libation, iced coffee. I’ll run you through some contenders.

Cafè Royal – Extra Strong

These Café Royal cats have their iced coffee shit on lockdown. You’re looking at the Extra Strong line. But they have a whole host of flavours, my original intention was a blogpost dedicated solely to this one brand. And yet life passes most people by while they’re making grand plans for it.


So it came to pass that after this first memorable encounter I never saw Café Royal again, running out of petrol stations before I’d crossed the Swiss border into Austria. A sad allegory for the fleeting nature of life, a lesson in grabbing opportunity while you can. I’m left instead with the memory of that delicate nectar as it slipped down my throat, the kick of the added caffeine only the Extra Strong line could provide, and the loving wash of the artificial sweeteners on my brain. A moment made more beautiful by its precious transience, it will be in my heart always.


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Emmi – Caffè Latte Macchiato ‘I’m sooo creamy’

These days you can find the Emmi line in any Tesco extra, but the acid test is drinking it in situ. In the same way prosciutto di Parma tastes better on the terrace of a hilltop village in Piemonte, or a devilish fromage de chèvre hits the palate with more resonance whilst sitting in the shade of an umbrella pine overlooking the valley of the Luberon, I figured drinking a german iced coffee in Germany would take on greater meaning. But Emmi is made in Switzerland, so my logic didn’t fly. Like all other iced coffees it was sweet, and pretty sickly. It was creamy though. So creamy.


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Mr Brown – Coffee Drink

I blame the craft beer revolution for turning me into one of those guys whose heart genuinely falls when looking right then left then right again at the bar and failing to see a tap with that cool lick of condensation itching to pump out a pint of obscure pale ale. There are still pubs aplenty you don’t even need to walk into to know their beer of the week will be a toss up  between numbers and not remotely cold Carling extra cold. The pub equivalent of Ronsil Quick Drying Woodstain, doing exactly what it says on the tin.


In loosely the same way Mr Brown Coffee Drink is only stocked in Germany’s most godforsaken petrol stations. But when in the baking sun in the outskirts of some shit town in North Rhine-Westphalia, it hits the spot. It looks, tastes, and is cheap. But comes in a can. Which none of the others do. A lovely little USP.


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Nescafe Xpress

Gggnnnhhyuuuggh under no circumstances go near one of these. It’s admirable the way they’ve managed to condense 18 tonnes of refined sugar into a bottle that size, but it is fucking disgusting. I think I got stopped for speeding that morning. Three weeks later I’m still gagging from the memory.


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Movenpick – Espresso

I have absolutely no memory and made no mental note of anything to do with this iced coffee. I don’t even have any opinions about its packaging. In a blind tasting Sam Allardyce would pick Movenpick.


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Caffè Lattesso – Cappuccino

If iced coffee was a character from a film then Caffè Lattesso Cappuccino would be Johhny Depp walking through Miami International airport in Blow.

Or Dufresne crawling out of the shit-pipe to freedom.

Or Larusso post crane-kick manoeuvre.

This is more than iced coffee. It’s the moment of all our lives. If I ever have a child, I want an ice cold Caffè Lattesso to reach for at the moment of truth in the maternity ward. If Harry Kane ever scores the winner in the Champions League final I’ll be pouring Caffè Lattesso Cappuccino all over the fools next to me on my L-shaped sofa, hoping it’ll stain, because it will be a Caffè Lattesso stain. Before coolly reaching for another from a fridge full of them, chilling to perfection.


I remember the moment like it was yesterday. A petrol station in northern Bavaria. A muggy afternoon. A smiling petrol station attendant, blonde, eyes like emeralds in a glassy sea, the first pair of eyes I saw once I’d come to on the petrol station forecourt after passing the fuck out. I asked her to marry me, she laughed and kissed me on the cheek, and pulled out a glossy of some bearded german brey. At any rate, the elevation of an artificially coloured sweetened caffeine drink from exactly that to one of the defining moments of my life was a profoundly humbling experience, and one that left me deeply moved.


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It tastes much like all the others, but comes with a little amaretti-type biscuit hidden in the top. Check it out.


Kapow.

I wasn’t taking any chances on more Movenpick non-moments and loaded up.

As I cycled off into the greyness of that September afternoon, I glanced back and saw Helda’s hand pressed up against the glass, as her eyes locked onto mine in a retinal embrace, an imperceptible longing etched onto her silken face. All at once my life unravelled before my eyes, and as my soul soared skyward my heart threw itself against my chest, imploring my head to turn my bike around, to be within a heartbeat of her once more.

They say that what you love you must set free, and gazing back in her direction, still in my head were all the promises I had to keep, and in my legs the miles before I’d sleep. I turned away, and moved blindly onwards into the arms of some alternate destiny. Can I hand on aching heart say that Caffè Lattesso had no part to play in any of this? I can’t

What kind of iced coffee does that.

A Yo! to Nature on The Eve of A Bike Trip

I had been pounding my mountain bike through dense forest for over an hour.

The sinuous track finally straightened and I crested the pine-coated hill. I looked over at Wilma and grimaced, then stared out across the vast unending lands stretching out ahead of us and channeled the last of the Mahican in me. These were the territories of the Native American tribes who had roamed freely over these hills and prairies for tens of thousands of years, existing in a deep spiritual communion with a sacred earth they called a mothering power.

I was born in Nature’s wide domain! The trees were all that sheltered my infant limbs, the blue heavens all that covered me. I am one of Nature’s children. She shall be my glory: her features, her robes, and the wreath of her brow, the seasons, her stately oaks, and the evergreen.

George Copway Kahgegagahbowh, The Ojibwe People (1848)

*

That was in 2016, near the beginning of a 2,800 mile bike race that ran the length of the Rocky mountains from Alberta in Canada to the US border with Mexico. That trip was about as far from normal as a bike trip can get, but is an example of the fact that for the last decade of my life, it’s become clear that I can’t really do any travelling anywhere if I don’t have my bicycle with me. I wouldn’t really know how.

In 2007 when i was 24, my mate Guy and I took some bikes to Japan on a journey into the unknown, and thenceforth spent the next few years chasing the two-wheeled dragon wherever we could. We braved the southern spaces of the Arctic circle and unending daylight in Norway, and traversed Eastern Europe from Poland through Slovenia, Hungary and the Ukraine, crossing the Carpathian mountains into Bucharest.

In 2012 I took up the reigns alone, and went to the Andes for six weeks. That was the first trip that really scared me. 43 days at 3,500 metres above sea level, nights so cold water would freeze inside my tent, migraine-inducing altitude, you can read an account of it here. Closer to home my bike took me through Italy, the Alps of Austria and Switzerland, it showed me the length of Germany, there were forays through Holland and Belgium, and France many times over. And a month exploring New Zealand.

I’ve been eaten alive by sand-flies in a river near Dunedin, suffered third degree sunburn in the shadow of Mount Cook, had 3am hallucinations in the deserts of New Mexico, slept in a village on Japan’s east coast that has since been destroyed by a wave, was run off a mountain road by the Romanian mafia, and bought apricots off a 60yr old Ukranian woman with a handlebar moustache. I’ve looked down roads I can’t see the end of, camped out in the middle of them, got more lost than you can ever fathom, I’ve felt the most sad, tired, confused, and by turns the most at peace, elated, and alive I’ve ever felt in my life.

All from the saddle of a touring bike.

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Discovering the world by bicycle has become my favourite thing in life. It is something I crave when I feel distant from it. It is something I feel a physical pull towards. And is something that fuels me for months once I have returned from it. Until the point where that flame has weakened and splutters and I look for the next chance to go again.

I thought long and hard as to why I felt this so strongly, and I came to a realisation. This physical pull, this joy, this peace of mind, this aliveness, this residual contentment in its aftermath, none of it is actually about the bicycle. Not really. It’s about where the bicycle deposits you. I realised that it was about something far bigger than just the bike. It was about getting the hell away from cities, and getting back into nature. It was something wise and ancient inside me, calling me back to the mountains and the rivers and the birdsong and the silence.

In 1845 the American writer Henry David Thoreau, in his late 20s, built himself a small cabin among the pine trees on the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, wanting to see what it would be like to live cut off from other people, in communion with nature. He summed up his experiences in the book Walden.

He went for long walks, read, mended his clothes, gathered fruit, went fishing and mused on what holds us all back from living in this way. Amid the trees with only birds and badgers for company, he ate and lived simply, but felt like a king. At the end of his time in the woods, Thoreau returned to the modern city sceptical of its so-called achievements and determined to live according to the wisdom and modesty that is the gift of the natural world.

Thoreau was tapping into something innate. This need to be in nature, I have come to believe is deeply nested in every single one of us, thanks to the seven million years of human evolution, and the hundreds of millions of years before that, when we lived in the world and all of the world was just trees. What Thoreau was saying was the same wisdom the Native American tribes had passed down between them since time immemorial.

Nature’s features, her robes, the wreath of her brow, shall be our glory.

I remember one morning lying against the trunk of a giant Eucalyptus in the South Island of New Zealand, looking up and watching its branches and leaves silhouetted against the sky dance in an almighty summer wind. And an intuition came to me that I’ve never forgotten. Straight out of left field. Nothing is wiser or cleverer than nature. I remember thinking it clearly and indelibly. Nothing has been here longer or is more perfectly designed or knows more. It was here before us and will be here after us, and we should pay attention to what it has to say.

Getting into one environment can also get you out of another. And the world of screens and status updates and vibrating alerts and inadequacy, the world of rush hour commutes and screw faces and carbon monoxide and fear,I think we could all use getting the hell away from for a minute or more. It’s not just what nature can give you, but also what it can take you away from.

I wanted to write this because I’m off on my bicycle tomorrow evening at dusk, my ferry lands in Saint–Malo on the north coast of Brittany at eight in the morning, and for the next ten daysI will trace a path as far down the belly of France as I can get. I have my tent, some reading material, a notebook, some clothes to mend, some fruit to gather, the company of birds and badgers, and some fishing to do.

I was going to make this a detailed account of the tiny things that make cycle touring so majestic, but I thought i’d use the next two weeks for research. So here’s Wild Geese by the poet Mary Oliver, if you want you can find her propping up the bar with Thoreau and Kahgegagahbowh, the fellow with the feather peaking out above his head at the start.

They’re all singing from the same hymn sheet.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees 
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and i will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

No One Knows Anything Ever

I read something recently which stayed in my head.

Showing people photos of your children is not asking for their honest opinion.

I’ve found this to be the case. I don’t think many of us really care. Not after the first photo, which everyone displays a certain curiosity to see, to see if the baby is normal-looking and doesn’t look possessed and looks vaguely like both parents. Louis CK has a segment saying something similar.

Hypocritical of me then, to write something consisting exclusively of photos of a kind not that removed from the one so far maligned; photos of my parents on the day of their wedding. Photos that tick the same boxes you could argue, photos of people beloved to you, but of no great interest to those whose attention you’re so fervently drawing them to.

But I can justify the below. To start with, photos of the past are more interesting than photos of some unformed future. Which is essentially what photos of kids are, representations of some unclear, little-formed, unpleasantly snot-strewn future.

Secondly, if it wasn’t for the day represented below, I wouldn’t be here, and you wouldn’t be reading this. So the below relates to you too. The third reason is that it’s topical. My parents got married thirty five years ago yesterday.

They made a swanky photo album.

My mother.

My Argentine cousins dressed as gauchos.

My grandfather looking pretty 19th Century.

My mother levitating.

The vicar looking like a character from Tintin.

Papa pleased because he made the papers.

My Argentine grandparents looking fly.

Only eyes for one.

My mother having regrets.

Papa getting his gurn on.

The best man.

The Holy Trinity.

Welcome to the faaaamily.

Father and daughter.

Speeches that evening.

My cousin’s thank you letter.

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But there’s another reason that these photos are interesting to me. And that’s because recently more than a few of my friends, contemporaries, people I’ve grown up with and known for a decade-plus, have done exactly the same thing as my parents did that day. Get married. And now more than a few of them are having babies. Which is where the showing people photos of your kids diatribe came from.

But the one common denominator in all of this is that not one of them, not from where I was standing, knew a thing about what they were doing. Getting married, getting pregnant, having babies, watching them grow, no-one has the faintest idea what they’re up to. They just style it out. Which is why digging up old photos of a wedding that happened thirty-five years, demanded I reframe my understanding of them.

Where before these faded photographs showed me a man and a woman going through the perfectly rehearsed motions of something they were always meant to do, something predestined, I think differently now.

From seeing my friends fumble and err and style it all out, I realise my parents were none the wiser either. The photos above are documents of this. They didn’t have a clue. At no point throughout any of the day documented above did they know either what they were up to, or what they were letting themselves in for. Growing up we think our parents have all the answers.

They don’t. And we won’t. I assume things will never really make sense. I suppose we begin to care less about understanding nothing.

The Time I Worked In An Office

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.


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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.

One Puff at A Time My Asthma And Me

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.

3000 kilometres at 4000 metres

When I’m old and sedated by my years perhaps I’ll dine out on the memory of an English summer many years ago when I spent six weeks at 4,000 metres above seal level cycling through an endless Argentine winter.

A detailed account of exactly what one person gets up to on his own in a tent for 45 days is for another day and perhaps a different audience, so here’s a foreshortened version of events for you to draw your own conclusions as to what brought about the terror which that barren wilderness unleashed inside me, enslaving me to demons which now deprive me of sleep and have me bound to a hospital bed, sweating rabidly between convulsions and speaking in tongues.


*


First off I want to clarify that Argentina is more than just a combination of the world’s greatest footballers and the world’s most beautiful women.

The first thing that slaps you clean across the face is its size.


s h i t  i s  m a s s i v e

In terms of cycle touring I pretty much experienced the most radical stuff I ever have on a bike.


A savage untamed wilderness haunted me at every turn.

Unending stretches of sand sank my bike wheels halfway through the floor and made any semblance of progress a joke.

And a 7 hour 53km ascent up to a pass at 4,300m almost did for me.

But coasting down the other side was fresh.


75km of nonstop free-wheel

There was also the bonus of cycling the same road drug-traffickers use to run their contraband down from the Bolivian border to Buenos Aires where they ship it out to Europe. With the sheer units involved and the pigs constantly on their tail, spillages are inevitable.

Bolivian uncut, pure as the driven snow. That afternoon I chewed up the kilometres like they were Bubbaloo, relentlessly chatting shit into my ear about absolutely nothing, of which I remember nothing, since I wasn’t listening to a word I was saying.


*


Nowhere I have been comes close to the remoteness I experienced on the roads out there, the feeling of existing in places where humans don’t very often tread. Every day I saw nothing but empty roads stretching out endlessly away from me towards the horizon; at times so relentless that calculating the distance ahead of me was counter productive in that it made me not want to start cycling at all.

It got so desolate sometimes that for want of a smoother surface I made that shit count and camped out in style.

The hugeness of the landscape obliged me to switch up the focus from a far too distant destination back to the simple process of pedalling; the bicycle equivalent of taking very small baby steps, one foot in front of the other. In this manner I inched my way for 3,200km down the spine of the country from the Bolivian border to the province of Mendoza.

Meeting legends along the way, making memories by the bucketload, leaving pieces of my heart strewn here and there, and more importantly taking time out to grow an absolutely gangsta handlebar moustache.

I also saw some heavy sunsets.

Cactuses bigger than houses.

Villages dedicated solely to the production of condiments.

Some state of the art petrol stations.

Some of the world’s most informative road signs.

And Argentina’s answer to Bradley Wiggins.

Six weeks alone on the road, heat from the locals was an inevitability I had to live with.

So I upped my security with a tight support vehicle.


*

When it comes to the cycling, I think Hemingway said it best:


It is only by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of a country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.

I definitely think the physical memories of places are intensified by the exertion it takes to haul your tired behind through them, and if I put my mind to it I can remember details of every single day of the 45 I spent in the saddle. The sun on my back, always the smell of the tarmac, the dirt coating my skin, the dryness at the back of my throat that no amount of water could assuage. You forge strong bonds with particular roads you graft through and villages you collapse in. I don’t exaggerate when I say at times I felt even the walls were speaking to me.

The relentless rhythm of cycle touring means that after killing yourself one day, beating your legs into submission, and face planting onto the floor of your tent drooling dust out the corner of your mouth, somehow you get up the next morning and do it all over again. It is symbolic of a bigger thing. You go through every single emotion possible, every single day travelling by bike in this way.


*

I think touring by bicycle is an allegory for life itself.


And the one constant, the thing that keeps you going, on and on, face down through gritted teeth into the unrelenting headwind…

– asides from some expertly brewed early morning caffeine injection –

Is the thought of what might be round the next bend in the road, down into the next valley, or over the next hill.

When that stops mattering you might as well sack it all in and hit up Cafe Jack.

Yup. Cafe Nero in Argentina is actually called Cafe Jack.

These Non-Dairy Milk Substitutes Are Lethal

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 End of the Martian is Deep AF

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.

Remember The First Day Back At School

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.

How To Join Instagram From A Laptop

In an especially moving scene in Gladiator, a soulful Maximus looks into the middle-distance as his gravelly baritone reverberates over the fields of barley, and he utters the immortal words…

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

This doesn’t happen, but it’s a good segway. At the weekend, I managed to join instagram using nothing but a laptop and a nokia last seen in shops around 1984. I achieved this in less than a day.

BIG DEAL.

Comes the chorus from the hypnotic glowing interfaces. Instagram has been around for almost a decade, get with the program. Well, as it turns out, instagram is a smartphone only application. 

You don’t see this fellow tapping away on his laptop do you. 

His laptop has instead blurred into the background behind a succulent as he signs into instagram from a smartphone, ignoring the strawberry shortcake parfait to his right to keep the crumbs well away from his Okayama denim shirt.

But being the proud owner of this bad boy meant instagram was an option that had remained closed to me.

GET A SMARTPHONE YOU FOOL.

But I didn’t want to. My reticence came in the form of a quiet voice whispering to me, one that hated being the hostage of the next email or a notification or intrusion that kept me locked in an intensive relationship with my phone. I thought having a nokia with all its limitations would afford me a certain type of freedom.

The chance to gaze at the autumn’s falling leaves, without the option of making said private moment public and enhancing it with a poignant #hashtag. Only to miss the rest of the autumnal scene I was witnessing because I was checking my phone to see who had liked the photo of the autumnal scene I was in the middle of that I was missing.

WHY JOIN INSTAGRAM AT ALL THEN BRO.

Is a good question.

Something about seeing what all the fuss is about, being aware of what I was missing, keeping my enemies closer. Probably because I’d read about the mini-endorphin hit one is meant to get from being on the receiving end of an instagram ‘like’. And how I could do with a few of those, maybe even get a follower or two, while being careful to not make it the sole currency or source of my validation, because that would be weird.

SPIT IT OUT THEN MATE.

Of course.


*

First came the research part.

Was this even possible? Apparently so.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

I looked at some video tutorials to get started, but their ambient soundtrack made me want to roll a phat one and float downstream, which would get me nowhere. So I closed YouTube and went read-only.

1. To kick things off, I had to download a program onto my phone called Bluestacks.

2. Then I had to download a mac friendly ‘Instagram’ application onto my desktop.

3. I then had to run the instagram app through Bluestacks, making sure it was setup properly, but being careful not to absent-mindedly simply run it through my mac because it would pick up on the fact that it wasn’t a phone, thus making instagram unusable because it is a smartphone-only application.

4. Basically Bluestacks was fooling my computer into thinking it was a smartphone.

5. Then came the first big hurdle. Blustacks didn’t want to connect to the internet.

6. There was a way around this.

7. What i had to do was download something called ES File Explorer.

8. Which took quite a long time.

9. This then allowed me to get onto a rather pixelated faux ‘smartphone screen’ from my desktop.

10. From where I could log into instagram.

11. Hammer-time.

12. If I then wanted to upload photos of my daily life – since I gather this is what instagram is for – to update people you don’t speak to about your life, well-constructed selfies, brunches you’re about to enjoy, photos of your children, holidays you’re on with friends, making sure to render the photos as desirable as possible to leave the people you don’t speak to in no doubt that you are on top of things and that your life is great, so when you see these people, they know exactly what you’ve been up to and you don’t have to waste time with smalltalk, if I wanted to do all of this, then the process was as follows.

13. I would have to get out my trusted Canon G5X, since the pixels on my nokia phone camera just didn’t cut it, and snap away at these photos of my well-constructed life, perhaps even mould my life into instagram-worthy snapshots, so people could keep abreast of what I was up to, while I was at it.

14. But most importantly, making sure to keep the photos spontaneous-looking, as if they had been caught in the blinking of a smartphone’s eye.

15. Finally, upload them onto my computer with a usb cable once I got home.

16. And finally of course, the instagram post itself.

17. Posting was a bit of a minefield. The fake smartphone interface was so pixelated that I literally had to write posts with my eye 3mm away from the computer screen, which as you can imagine didn’t do my retina the world of good.

18. So all in all, one post took me on average the wrong side of 35 minutes. Not what one would describe as insta, but not too bad.

So what does the future hold.

My thinking is the relative labour-intensiveness of the whole process might make me more discerning with what I post, and as a result my quality control will take care of itself. But that’s for my followers to judge. So four days in, how is it going? Well as you can see I have three times less followers than people I follow, which in instagram-speak means for every one person that likes me, three people hate me and everything I represent.

Each unfollow is like a knife through the heart, but I know I just have to ride out these tricky first weeks. 

And I’m seeing my therapist on Monday.

HOW LONG YOU GONNA STICK AT IT THEN MATE.

I dunno. Until I get enough personal validation to make me happy I suppose. But not past the point where I start measuring my sense of worth by how many followers I get, or how many people like my posts, that kind of thing. Just find a sweet spot between the two.

*

So keep your eye’s peeled for some from-the-hip gramming guys.

Don’t forget to #followback.

(please follow back)

Prepping for The Most Terrifying Journey Of All

Not a whole lot goes on in Calgary.

There I was having an early morning pootle a couple of weeks back, assessing the situation, and decided to cop myself an iced coffee and a sparkling mineral water, a combination fond to me and conducive I thought to an early morning frame of mind that played into the hands of further assessment of the situation. What struck me soon upon entering the Drugstore and assessing the situation of the drinks fridge was that it was absolutely impossible for me to buy either component of this favoured combination without procuring my bodyweight in liquid.

The sizing in North America is a joke. The photo’s perspective is not the best, but that’s literally a pint of iced coffee and that’s a litre of fizzy water. And no this isn’t some family pack thing, there was literally nothing smaller. Which got me thinking that capitalism and greed and not biting the hand that feeds to one side, maybe the reason everything is Supersized over there is more of an art imitating life thing. North America is vast. The products are simply mimicking their surroundings.

Which ties somehow into my next point. About four months ago a seriously questionable individual with a hazy sexual orientation sat down by the side of my bed loined in a pink towel and asked me a question.

Four months later, me and him fly back to Calgary this lunchtime with two of his prototype Big Bro Brother Cycles Mountain Bikes stashed safely in cargo, to undertake the mother of all cycle tours.

We are racing from Banff in Canada to the US border with Mexico at Antelope Wells, along off-road trails the length of the North American Continental Divide, the tectonic plate meeting point that formed the Rocky Mountains.

In terms of tapping into my survival instincts I think it shits and will shit all over anything I ever do in my entire life, and that includes going to the Cineworld in West India Quay to watch Dark Skies.

The more I think about what lies in store over the next few weeks the queazier I become. It’s 2,800 miles, 60,000 vertical metres of climbing, which we plan to finish in 25 days, which boils down to 12 hours of pedalling and 106 miles of movement each day. On shitty, muddy, unrelenting, godforsaken, long-forgotten, backwater trails. The drop-out rate is over 50%.

We have grizzly bear spray for the north, and fuck knows what for the tarantulas of New Mexico. We face sub-zero temperatures at the start and baking hot unending deserts in the south. We’ll hopefully high five some indelible memories, and tap into reserves of pain and stubbornness and fear and likewise elation and hysteria we didn’t know were there, enough to break the memory-bank, proper Werther’s Original stuff.

Most of all I look forward to the company of silence, of pine forests and river torrents and mountain tops and nature at its most raw and untamed, not to mention the peculiar folk who inhabit such remote parts of the world, that no doubt will find us just as peculiar as we roll through on our fat tyres like the muddied living dead. And hey yo, we’ve got each other. Whether we like it or not.

Nothing much left to say other than writing this thing out has made me feel even queasier. But at the same time I find myself so excited I can barely sit still or hold a single thought in my head. That must be the excitement only a free man can feel. A man at the start of a long journey. Whose conclusion is uncertain. I’ll leave you now, feeling more than a little timorous, with one of my great pal Jonty’s favourite lines in the english language, the words of Seamus Heaney.

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

A Sunset My Brother and Wayne Rooney

In a tense Euro quarter-final in 2004 at the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, midway through the first half after a tackle from Jorge Andrade, an 18yr old Wayne Rooney, the star of the tournament, went down holding his foot. He was stretchered off with a broken metatarsal, and England went on to lose on penalties.

Some time not long after still in the middle of that long hot summer, my brother Miguel was on holiday with his then girlfriend in Barbados, soaking in the sand and surf and the palm leaves swaying drunkenly in the sea breeze. Just him, her, and a professional photographer tailing their every move.

Upon his return he told me about his trip. And proffered me some fraternal words of advice:

Mate.

Should you ever find yourself on a Caribbean island, perhaps in the company of a lady friend, perhaps in a romantic capacity, and walking together hand in hand along the golden sands, perhaps you stumble upon a beach bar pumping the latest in dancehall and soca riddimz out across the turquoise waters, and looking into each other’s eyes life suddenly seems to make a whole lot of sense, then good on you. But please. Under no circumstances, repeat no circumstances – attempt to hit the dancefloor.

But why? I asked.

Bajans come out of the womb dancing to soca bro. You don’t stand a chance. Your girlfriend will want to spend the rest of her days in the shade of the drunken palms making mixed-race babies, you’ll be emasculated and feel like a royal asshole, without any doubt you’ll look like one, and you and your girlfriend will have a barney that will have you trudging down the beach, alone, cursing the name Charles D. Lewis under your breath with all the mercury-bubbling wrath of hell’s flames.


*


N E V E R T H E L E S S

As my man Alfie – who has devised to teach his 3 year old daughter Iris ancient philosophy through the medium of Pixar – recently reminded me, Kungfu Panda drops an atom bomb of Stoicism in the 3rd instalment of the eponymously-named legendary trilogy.

One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.


*

Which rung especially true for my brother that afternoon. Walking off down the beach misanthropically kicking a football, a desultory shell of his former-self, he stumbles across none other than, aforementioned broken metatarsal protected in a cast, bedecked in some oustanding beach wear, taking some well earned respite from Coleen, and probably from being the most talked about 18 year old on the planet.

With Coleen nowhere in sight, and Miguel’s girlfriend busy getting schooled in the art of dancefloor seduction by seven Bajans, they bust back to my brother’s beach-hut, spend the afternoon hoovering uncut Colombian, and my brother introduces young Wayne to the delights of on-line gambling.

How Instagram Looks From Over Here

Time Out this week had a piece in it about Mayor of London Sadiq ‘I went to fabric when I was younger, I don’t want it closed down’ Khan, and how when walking around town he has to field a constant barrage of selfie requests from the baying populace.

Hey, it’s a nice problem to have rallies Sadiq, a clear contender for another top position, Mayor of the chill-out zone. But it got me thinking about selfies. And that the name bestowed upon them, now listed in the Collins English Dictionary, is more apt than might initially be obvious. Selfies aren’t just a photo taken of oneself, by oneself. In the current day’s oversharing electronic interconnectedness of everything, the purpose of selfies are resoundingly for oneself. Gettysburg shit.

The people clamouring for selfies of Sadiq aren’t in the hunt for a framed 10″ glossy to adorn the mantelpiece. They’re doing it to seek immediate validation from whoever might see the photo once its uploaded onto the internet. Likes are the new gold stars on the board at prep school.

Food-blogging I can tolerate, selfies with Sadiq, but the thing I can’t get my head around is the following. If you’re having brunch with friends, out in the beer-garden of a gastropub on a sunday for example, what possible need do you have to tell two hundred other people about it. The truth of the matter is this. No-one, nobody, looks at the photos of your brunch and thinks how nice.

Everyone looks on at that brunch and thinks shit.

My life is deficient. They must do this every sunday. Why don’t I ever do that shit. They look like they’re all having a great time. Hey, I know a few of them. Why wasn’t I invited. But they didn’t think of me. Maybe there’s a reason they didn’t invite me. Maybe they don’t like me. What did I do.

*

Why this need to interrupt an intimate setting with friends to take a photo of it, with a view to publicising the setting and its intimacy, therefore rendering it anything but intimate. I’m mystified. And the only explanation I can come up with to justify this behaviour, is that folk are posting these photos of their brunches to counter the fact that everyone else is telling you about the brunch they‘re having with their friends that you‘re not at, and you feel the need, nay the pressure, to keep up appearances.

So what emerges is a thinly-veiled one-upmanship that in its essence makes you feel inadequate, out of control, and unhappy. Longing for a less loaded time, when you could sit there twiddling your thumbs in blissful ignorance of anything going on anywhere other than the place where you might find yourself in that moment, bathing in the calm of merely being present, and looking forward to seeing people and learn what they’d been up to straight from the horse’s mouth, because they would tell you.

This is well trodden stuff and way too boring and depressing for a Friday afternoon, but like my Turkish electrician Redjeb told me on Thursday morning, The End of Days is closer than we think.

A Bunch of Stuff Your Uncle Can Teach You

We all wonder Who is God? What’s going to happen when we die. I don’t think it’s ever… nothing. I’m very fond of Lucretius. And Lucretius says that everything is a little energy. You go back and you’re these little bits of energy and pretty soon you’re something else. Now that’s a continuance. It’s not the one we think of when we’re talking about the golden streets and the hierarchy of angels. Even angels have a hierarchy. But it’s something quite wonderful. Everything is mortal. It dies. But its parts don’t die. Its parts become something else. And we know that when we bury a dog in the garden with a rose bush on top of it, there is replenishment.

And that is pretty amazing.

 That was an excerpt from an interview with the poet Mary Oliver.

*

The Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park in the South Island of New Zealand is famous for it’s lack of light pollution. Like the Atacama in Chile people travel from far and wide to come and see the starscapes. On my recent trip there, an English guy called Sean drew me a map by hand and said to me if you’re ever venturing that way or passing along that particular road, take this map with you and go and find the X that marks the spot. A couple of weeks later I took him up on it. I hooked a right off the main road onto a dirt track and cycled for an hour along a slight incline, following the road along a river valley surrounded on either side by vast looming mountains.

The map told me to bridge two streams, and just before the third to cut right and pass through a gate onto a cattle track. Hide your bike somewhere and pack what you need for one night in a dry bag, food, clothes etc. Make sure it’s a dry bag because you’re going to have to ford a waist-high river. I packed what I thought I might need, hid my bike in a thicket, waded across the river, and climbed up into the hills following an ever-disappearing and reappearing track, all the time clutching at this piece of paper where Sean had marked out in biro the contours of the hills from memory. For three hours I walked, moving what I hoped was closer to the X, the subject of his map.

I moved into a whole new valley, a plateau I had no idea existed since it was invisible from the spot where I’d left my bike. As I walked the sense of isolation became like an adrenalin inside me, purely by dint of how alarming it felt to feel so alone and so small, wandering amidst a landscape made for giants. Tracing my way along a rocky outcrop to my left handside I heard the sound of cascading water from a stream, and finally laid eyes on Sean’s fabled X.

It was an old mustering hut from the 1870s, a place of refuge for the cattle and sheep farmers during the long winters spent moving their animals around in search of greener pastures. Inside were three bunks, a table with two stools, and a map on the wall, and the names of previous travellers scribbled into the wooden beams and the walls of corrugated iron. I dumped my stuff, went on a walk up to the highest point I could see, washed in the stream, ran around buttnaked for a little while for good measure, ate a couple of sandwiches I’d picked up at a petrol station that morning, and got into my sleeping bag.

At 2am my phone alarm went off. I woke up, put my jacket and shorts and beanie on and walked outside. Squinting my eyes half-shut, I laid down by the stream, put my head back on the grass and, stretching my arms and legs out into a starshape, opened my eyes. I’ve never seen so many stars in my life.

The constellations I was semi-familiar with were completely invisible, indistinguishable from the gazillions of their new neighbours that had apparently been there all along, but yet had only just now magically appeared to me. It was as if God himself had picked up a huge fistful of sherbert and summoning his best curve-ball had launched it at the night sky. I felt the surge of a strong instinct to concentrate, because I’d never again see a sky quite like the one i was gazing up at.

*

My uncle Adrian was obsessed with the stars, and all things space-related. He owned many telescopes. He was at Nasa HQ during Armstrong’s first small step for man, covering the moon-landings for the front page of The Telegraph. He wrote many books outlining the future of mankind, which were translated into many languages including for the Japanese, who were crazy for them.

Adrian breathed to walk, and showed my brother and I the joys he took from placing one foot in front of the other for hours on-end during a weeklong trip to Zermatt when we were twelve. I drank my first ever beer in his company on the terrace of a mountain hut, under the watchful eye of the Matterhorn.

I remember walking with him and his two dogs Basil and Otto through Richmond Park on a rainy Saturday morning when I was ten, furiously scribbling notes for some homework essay I had to write about the future, while Adrian waxed about the millions of different directions the earth might go in, and the myriad of paths upon it mankind might take. I remember my teachers being so surprised at the detail of the essay and incredulous as to the source of my pre-wikipedia research that it was published in the school review.

I remember Adrian used to put cherry tomatoes in his cereal for breakfast. He had the coolest sci-fi VHS collection in the world. He was the first grown-man I ever saw cry, when Basil drowned in the swimming pool one Sunday and we buried him in the dog-graveyard. He taught me all about chess and Kasparov and Deep Blue and how we were witnessing the rise of machine over man. He had an incredible warmth, and was tactile in a way that was not common on the English side of my family. He would bound up to me when he saw me and bellow ‘what‘s the news?!’ with an almighty grin on his face.

*

Staring into unending space outside that mustering hut at two in the morning, looking up at the stars after my four hour walk, I thought of Adrian back at home in London, fighting cancer, and it became clear to me in that moment how obvious were the reasons why he loved the things he loved so much. And I felt glad and thankful that he’d shown me those things when I was young, and it was largely because of him that I’d gotten myself into the situation I was now in, lying on my back in the dark after my walk into the hills, staring up at the Milky Way.

Adrian was my mother’s eldest brother. He died this morning.

The Trouble When Strangers Are Too Nice

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.

One of The Weirdest Nights of My Life

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.

My Parents And Tech And John Travolta

Oscar Wilde said: 


The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.



In the last few years as I’ve watched my parents lean inquiringly over the parapet of their own mortality, it’s like they seem to be trying their damndest to be more and more down with the kids. My mother’s fondness for abbreviated txt spk busts my balls in an adolescent way I should really rise above, as does her newfound need to walk around everywhere with her iPad strapped to her forehead. I thought my old man was faring a bit better, but no.


I got this email from my mum on Saturday entitled.


 Pops watching Grease on lovely summer afternoon.

And the attached photo.

On one of the balmiest Saturdays to hit rural Buckinghamshire in recent memory, with the mercury pushing 32, it’s a photo of my old man, inside, chair pulled up to within 6 inches of our 2003-model Hitachi, hypnotised by the hit musical Grease. This is a man who chastises my brother and I as idiots, who can hardly bear to have a conversation with us because we haven’t finished In Search Of Lost Time, and who has about 0.4 friends because it takes him all of half an hour to declare anyone he ever meets a bore.

Not so intellectual now are you pops.

Annoyingly the case for my father’s defence is being aided by my mother’s obvious ‘mastery’ of the technology at her fingertips. The photo is that size because my mother sent all 12KB of it.

Would the below stand up in court? 

That could literally be a vase with some pussy willow sticking out of it. I sent her an email telling her it was possible to send photos as well as just their thumbnails and she went mental.


*

Then again, this is all good news.

My mum being in the throes of an unrequited love affair with her iPad and my father watering his unhealthy obsession with John Travolta is actually the best thing ever. Because what kills us faster than old age is loss of enthusiasm. And as much as all this makes me want to roll around on the floor and moan like a twelve year old, it’s also proof my parents aren’t throwing in the towel any time soon. Which means I don’t have to take any responsibility for my life. None whatsoever. Not yet.

You Are Not Stallone I Am Here With You

Everyday is littered with tell-tale signs reminding us of the unwavering passage of time. One such sign I find particularly affecting, is how far I have to scroll down the DOB year list when I’m buying plane tickets or whatever. It’s not good. Also, Discmen.

Another one I find a little stinging, is that the film Cliffhanger is so close to my heart.

Anything you watch when you’re like eight is going to have a profound affect on you, and my brother and I wore the tape in this VHS down to the nub. But the above looks so old it could be a retro Bond poster. And that makes me feel old. I envy the youth of today, with their angry birds and their snapchat and most of all their attention spans.


But no youth of today has ever watched, or will ever watch Cliffhanger. As a result, no youth of today will ever be able to describe the unbridled joy of finding the best acting performance of all time, hidden within the first five minutes of this staggering bit of cinema.


It concerns the – in almost all respects – pretty tense scene when the lady falls from the trip-line.

Strange the way Sly’s triceps can’t take the weight of an 8-stone girl, but plot inconsistencies to one side, it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that is worthy of closer inspection.

As the scene nears its disturbing finale, Sly is doing his absolute worst to keep hold of this girl who’s about to fall to her death. Looking on from the side is the husband of the lady, some hench rock-climber with even less acting prowess than Stallone, and our aforementioned man Frank.


And it’s the performance of Frank the helicopter pilot that steals the show. While this lady is very evidently on the brink of death…


Frank is absolutely creasing himself.

Check him out.

Seriously just watch the scene.

At 0:15 he’s just warming up, but it’s on 1:10 – as she’s falling – that he’s in absolute hysterics.

I don’t know if Universal weren’t paying him enough and he’d decided to botch the film in the only way he knew possible, but I mean how else can you explain this behaviour? I’ll tell you one thing. At that moment in time acting was pretty low-down on the list of Frank’s priorities.


My brother and I used to spend days rewinding and watching this again and again and again. I love the fact we weren’t alone. Someone uploaded the same scene having hit upon the magic too.

You said it brother.

So am I buddy, so am I.


*

So to all those ragamuffins born two decades after me, I can’t play angry birds – I could but I won’t – I don’t know what TickTock is, and I won’t live to see the 2070 World Cup final. But I can recall the unbridled fear of buying a porn mag, and I can tell you about Ralph Waite’s frankly unbelievable performance in the first five minutes of Cliffhanger. And that makes me feel alive.

Morning Boys How’s The Water

Somebody recently wrote an article for Vice about the irony that 85% of his muslim brothers who wholeheartedly called for the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, had never actually read The Satanic Verses. He ended it with the sentence, ‘The Satanic Verses is to Muslim intellectuals what Infinite Jest is to hipsters. It’s on everyone’s shelves, and they all have strong opinions on the author, but most haven’t read past the first 30 pages.’

Bulls–eye my brother.

As you can see from the above copy, I didn’t get past the end of page 2. But like many people rolling around Hackney with no socks and shoes on, I do have a weird interest in the author of the book, David Foster Wallace. In the words of the Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky who followed him around for a week in 1996 at the back end of his book tour:

He was six-feet-two, and on a good day weighed 200 pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through school, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated, went to writing school, published a thousand-page novel aged 32, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.

They recently made a film about this exact encounter, the week Lipsky spent rolling around with Foster Wallace interviewing him, called The End Of The Tour. It’s totally brilliant. Try and watch it.

Given our generation’s newfound affinity with an attention span most akin to that of a housefly, the following is going to be a long-shot. But save it for a rainy day or a cycle-ride or an especially uneventful afternoon at work. It’s an interview with David Foster Wallace’s sister Amy about her brother, and it’s amazing and heartbreaking and an insight into an incredible mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drLEdNmbvsA&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=ElectricCereal

In 2005 he went to Kenyon College to make a speech to the graduating class of 2005. It was recorded, and now known as ‘This Is Water’.

It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard I think. And reverberated around in my brain for weeks afterwards. It touches on many things, and in twenty minutes there doesn’t seem to be a sentence out of keeping with the message of the talk. His voice is so calming that it wraps you up in a blanket and takes you smiling with lids half-closed every step of the way.

About the things staring us in the face, right under our noses, to which we have become so accustomed, we are no longer able to see them. He speaks of the importance of trying to see these things again.

There are two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning boys.. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other one and goes ‘What the hell is water?’

The Tiny Little Weirdnesses That People Are Made Of

P G Wodehouse, the guy who wrote Jeeves&Wooster, was also a golf obsessive. Amongst a multitude of references to his favoured pastime, he wrote the below.

The man who will go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only the eyes of God are on him, and play that ball from where it lies, is the man that will serve you faithfully and well

Quite asides from golf, the interesting thing about this is the idea of how we act when we know nobody is watching. With the knowledge that only the eyes of God are on us. And whether what we do in these situations differs from how we might act if we knew we were being watched. What do we let ourselves get away with. Would we play the ball from where it lies, or would we shift the ball to an easier spot, from where to lift it seamlessly onto the green.

All human interaction is an act of sorts. If you didn’t bend somewhat to the situation in front of you you’d spend your life hitting metaphorical walls at 100mph. There are people who do this but they tend to have extenuating circumstances like autism. People who bend too far tend to be slightly creepy. When someone is telling you everything you want to hear, you don’t believe a word they say. At the end of the day all we want is honesty and something real. Someone telling you every word you want to hear might be nice, but is slightly confusing.

There used to be an old function on Sky Sports called Player Cam. It gave you the option to ignore the game and just follow a single player of your choice running around the pitch, most of the time nowhere near the ball. It got boring after about three seconds but it did give birth to an idea.

The idea of Player Camming people.

People in the street. Your friends. The idea of watching them when they don’t know they’re being watched. To keep on recording after they think the cameras have stopped rolling. To keep your eyes trained on them when they think only the eyes of God are. Because this is when their guard is down and their act is over, when you get them at their most real. And you see the really weird shit.

Stuff they would never let you catch them doing in any social situation. Watch them while they wait at the bar getting a round of drinks in. Watch them watching tv. Next time you see them in the street stop yourself from bounding up and saying hello. Stalk them for a few minutes. See what they do and how they act. By the end you’ll have a pretty good idea if you still want to bound up and say hello at all.

This is one of the benefits of good friendships. And the greatest benefit of relationships. How they are under God’s watchful eye and how they are with you, become one and the same. You’re let into another person’s world where that person no longer gives a fuck, and is just one hundred per cent themselves to you, day in and day out. No longer trying to impress you, no longer trying to hide themselves from you. They’re so comfortable in your company you might as well not be there, in this situation you really are the equivalent of the eyes of God. Which means you get them all, the whole of them. The bravest and most generous gift they can give. What’s more, the gift is yours. No-one else’s.

What Robin Williams called the good stuff.

Evolution Tracers Or How To Go Back In Time

‘How did it get so late so soon?’asked Dr Seuss.

This post comes with its own soundtrack. Hopefully by the time you’re nearing the end, the bridge around the six minute mark will kick in, where all the horns come in, and your head will explode. That’s the idea.

The winter that bridged 2016 and 2017 passed by more quickly than I can ever remember one passing. I mean this morning was bone-curdlingly cold, I’m not heralding any freak arrival of spring. But seeing as how a whole lot of life is lived in the anticipation of things, I’m surprised how fast the moments themselves went by, how quickly the future became the past. It’s like Christmas and New Year got all Keyser Soze and, like that…

… were gone.

Some old greek guy once said that in childhood, the days are short and the years are long. But the older we get, the longer the days draw out, and as the years go by more quickly the shorter they seem. Which could be down to an increased lack of fascination with the world. As children all things astound us, and the nature of fun being that it flies by, this means the days pass by in the blinking of an eye.

But the older we get, with the responsibilities we take on, the routines we establish, the formulaic nature of our years pass without much to distinguish one from the next. And as we enter old age as happens when not much is going on, time drags. But because the years themselves go by with less life-enhancing content, they morph into one, so the polar opposite pattern from childhood emerges. In old age the days are long, and the years short.

Which must be why the armchair pipe and slipper brigade deem it so important to remain childlike in your perception, to do your finest Peter Pan impression around the clock, to prolong a fascination with things as much as you can. To make each day as memorable as possible. Doctors tell us that – illness to one side – the one thing that kills us far more quickly than old age, is loss of enthusiasm.

But asides from upping sticks and seeking out the ends of the earth on a pair of roller-blades, how else can we slow the speeding juggernaut of time? As memory-forging as it would undoubtedly be, you can’t spend your entire life blading across the Australian outback.

The answer….


– d r u m r o l l –

… is to keep a record of it.

That might come across a bit PG13, but a concrete way to fight time is to fight loss of memory. And our memories are so bad we need all the jump-leads we can get to kick start them. It’s no coincidence that one of the most famous works of world fiction called itself In Search Of Lost Time. I haven’t read it, but I know enough to know Proust was bemoaning the tendency life has to go all Keyser Soze on us. And the idea of memory as a means to combat this.



Because without memory, what do we have? If we can’t make sense of the past, we’re zombies. That’s why nights out when you can’t remember anything are so debilitating. You wonder where your life went. And that’s going to a lot more when we’re older. People who say all that matters is the present man are right only up to a point. Live the present like a gee, but if you don’t log it, how can you refer back to it. And that’s the point. To not let your life pass you by without taking time to check yourself. Before, during, and after you wreck yourself. To nurture memories you can later bask in.


Reading yourself back you realise how much you change. You get to trace your own evolution.


*


When you travel there’s a sadness you take with you. Even the most indelible experiences have their melancholy because the further afield you go, the less the probability is that you’ll ever go back there. Below is a photo of me on a stretch of road in the Andes mountains in Argentina on a bicycle trip.


I’d never felt more alone in my whole life. I wasn’t lonely, but I’ve never experienced deeper solitude. It was deafening. I was miles from anywhere, I hadn’t seen a car for about a day. As the sun set, for half an hour I went a bit cuckoo. I was overcome with this unquenchable energy and ran all over the place, screaming out across the vast mountainous emptiness like a fucking weirdo.

I know I won’t go back there. I won’t ever walk down that stretch of road again. An friend of mine told me once about the necessity of leaving yourself behind. You leave parts of yourself everywhere you go, little bits of yourself that you scatter here and there. They are yours to leave, this person said, and somewhere deep inside you know you need to leave them. In order to grow. The fact I won’t ever go back to that place shouldn’t bother me, because a part of me is still there, by that roadside, running around like a madman. And in my head, whenever I want, I can go back there.


*


This year, for the first time in my life I’ve kept a scrapbook.


I’ve written diaries in the past, but I’ve now started a discipline I can imagine continuing for good. The joy I’ve already taken from rereading the last 8 months of my life has surprised me. It’s time well spent. When I finally join the armchair pipe and slipper brigade I want to have piles and piles of scrapbooks. It’ll be like the richest dvd collection in the world. I can’t think of many better ways to while away idle days than by rereading your life, and discovering anew this person you’d forgotten. This might sound a touch self-indulgent, to spend hours alone with a book, written by you, about you, reading about yourself. Like a dog eating its own tail.


But to make sense of the world, it might be just what we need.

In a film called Elizabethtown, Kirsten Dunst spends a fair amount of time doing an unimaginably annoying thing. I would’ve lost my shit with her ten minutes into our first date. When she sees a moment she likes, she raises her hands to her face, making an imaginary camera with her thumb and index finger, and takes an imaginary photo.

But she’s on the money. It’s actually what I’m getting at. If we don’t take time out from life to log moments and situations in our heads, or in scrapbooks, or in diaries, we won’t be able to understand our own evolution. We’ll wake up wondering where the hell it all went.

The joy in rereading these moments is that you travel back in time and get to hang our with your younger self. You’ll be amazed by how much you change. The point is, we have to trace our evolution. We have to eat our own tail. If we can never understand why we’re here, at least this way we’ll come closer to understanding who we are.

My Father The Great Bonfire of The Vanities

My old man isn’t self-portrait photography’s number one fan. To say he’s got beef with having his photo taken is an understatement. I don’t know if this is out of vanity, or because even in these twilight years he still needs to max out on security because of the coke racket he’s eyeballs deep in. He took me aside once when I was four and with a look on his face I’ll never forget said, remember this hijo mio, it’s not getting in that’s the hard part, it’s getting out. I thought he was talking about the front door, which was confusing. Now it all becomes clear.

I shot the below straight from the hip as I pointed to the right and screamed WHAT THE HELL IS THAT at the top of my voice. He never saw it coming.

Anyway, I was hanging out with him the other day in his study at home, and told him I wanted a photo of him to take back to my flat and put in a frame.

He turned, and looked at me in the manner of someone placed on the earth for the sole purpose of answering a question they have waited their entire life to be asked. His lips trembled. He held himself together. Claro, he replied in the porteño of his youth. And reaching down to the second draw of the desk he pulled it open and fished something out, his voice cracking imperceptibly. 

Take it.

Are you sure?

I can’t take this one I protested, it’s such a great photo, I don’t want to take your only copy. He shook his head gravely and insisted. No, I want you to have it.

It was a moment. It felt like a symbolic changing of the guard, my father giving me a photo of himself – that rare thing – and one he was evidently proud of, I mean with reason, he looks great. Who doesn’t cherish that kind of photo of themselves. One that evokes more than the person you are, the person you want most to be. It was a little faded and clearly old, with a lovely quality to it.

And yet it felt like I was taking something away from him. It saddened me. I couldn’t help imagining it as something he would keep close to him always, in the second drawer down, as a testament to his youth, a memento, to clutch onto as the dark clouds of old age drift across the horizon. It’s not like he knows what the hell a scanner is.

But he insisted.

Take it.

And as I descended the stairs it was remarkable how touched I felt.

I vowed to find a frame worthy of it, so whenever my father came to visit, it would be there, in pride of place, shining out like a beacon for all to see.

On the way out I saw my mother, and opened my bag to show her.


Look what papa just gave me.


A peculiar pained recognition traced its was across her face.


Oh God, she said.

And she groaned, and I watched her eyes roll alarmingly far back inside her head. That photo. About thirty years ago your father, for the only time in his life, set foot inside a photo-shop, and had 45 copies of that photo made. Forty five. Your father has had a thirty year love affair with that bloody photograph. Our marriage has suffered because of it. The bloody profile. That wistful look. That yellow coat, it comes to me in nightmares. He hands them out like sweets. He’s trying to get rid of them. There are drawers full of them.

In their droves.

What’s The Difference Between Us

On those rare occasions when one pipes up with an opinion one has put some thought into, the result of a few idle hours of concentrated daydreaming, something on the whole a bit more meaningful than your sandwich-preference at Pret, I’ve found that the manner in which people respond to your waxing can be split up into six different character types.


*


The first type is the what the fuck are you on about type.

The look your five year old might shoot you when he clocks the topic of his bedtime story is fiscal policy in the upcoming US elections, or the reaction to removing the Sky remote from the clammy hands of some horizontal brother settling in for a Sky Sports News marathon. These people will never get you. But they never professed to. You might never get them. They’re harmless. You enjoy their company but you can’t really figure out why. For some reason inside they make you feel warm and fuzzy.


*

The second type is the yeah I kinda get you but I don’t really give a shit type.

These are the straight talkers, they’ve got the decency not to blank you completely, but they’re not exactly on your tip. They deem your philosophy to be pretty fucking far from the most important thing on the agenda for that evening’s pale ale smackdown. They’re probably one of your oldest mates, ones you made when you were twelve, ones you might not befriend as seamlessly now because you wouldn’t have that much in common. They think you just as stupid as you find them insensitive. But there’s no beef, you’re happy to be different. And they make you who you are.


*

The third is the but that’s completely fucking obvious type.

They look at you as if you’ve walked in the pub and announced on loudspeaker that you can spell ‘dog’ without fucking it up. And then fucked it up. They drink at the shallow end of the sensitivity-pool. These cats are so intelligent they already know everything you have to say. They like to turn discussions into arguments. They’re not overly interested in asking you about yourself, but they do like to shoot you down. They’re drowning in opinions, by far the cleverest guys in the room. So clever in fact, they’ve mastered the art of making you feel stupid. These people are the stupidest of all.


*

The fourth type is the do you really think so type.

The wide-eyed amazement type. The child in all of us. They make you feel like the cleverest people in the world. Almost too clever. Almost Godly. The drawback is they leave you with the sneaking suspicion that if you said the exact opposite, they’d react in the same way. This is a pretty great way to be. Grown adults with the open-mindedness of five year olds. I’d take this person over the previous three any day of the freaking week. These people are heaven-sent.


*

The fifth type is the silent serene nod of the head type.

No words. Perhaps not even any eye-contact. Just a few imperceptible nods of the head, and the hint of a smile. An understanding. These people make you feel everything is going to be okay. They make you feel like you belong at least somewhere. The people you could walk 56 miles along the hard-shoulder to Brighton with. The people you talk to past closing time, the people with whom you’d never think of pre-formulating conversation. The people you can be silent with.


*


The funny thing is although none of the first four might have understood you the way you wanted them to, each of the first four will have someone who reacts to them like number five, like Mr Miyagi. Their number five. The guy lying on the sofa opposite when number one suggests getting a Dominos in during the Sky Sports News break, for example. Or the person staring back at number four in stunned silence with pupils the size of suns.


Everyone has their Mr Miyagi. Everyone can find someone who agrees with them, even if they don’t agree with you. In here lies the endless variety in people, the spice of life. The reason you’ll see someone in the corner you had absolutely no vibe with whatsoever, laughing their arse off to the point of KO with someone else you never had any vibe with. Thank God for that. Otherwise we might all be the same. We might be the sixth variety.


*

We might be… Tom Cruise.


I can’t really figure out who or what Tom Cruise is, but he scares the shit out of me.


There’s no communication there. At all. None.


… so those are pretty much my thoughts on the universe.

Did you hear what I said?

Why do you never clock anything I say?

Tom?

Did you really do all your own stunts in Mission Impossible 2?

What’s with the scientology shit?

Did you love Nicole or was it all a cover-up?

Tom why do you never answer me?

Tom?

Tom?