Joyfeed

The following essay was originally published in the increasingly aptly named All The Rage in November 2007. Read on, then pay them a visit.

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Birds are abstract expressionists, but worms can only do self portaits.

So, yes, it’s autumn. According to this web page nothing happened in September, but that is wrong: a lot of things happened in September, it’s just that writing something for this web page wasn’t one of them. Because of, you might say, confusingly.

Here though, now that it is autumn, is some information about things that have happened in the last 24 hours, or that seem likely to happen soon.

7 Inch Cinema
Last night we went to the 7 Inch Cinema do upstairs in the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath. They showed many short films and promotional videos, most of which were very good in their own way, and there was a film quiz. I don’t know if we won the film quiz, because we left before the announcements. If we did win the film quiz, I would be flabbergasted. That’s not too strong a word: trust me, you didn’t hear the questions.

The point is that this is EXACTLY what you should be doing on a Sunday night. There will be further and broadly similar events on the last Sunday of October and the last Sunday of November, in the same upstairs. Furthermore the 7 Inch Cinema people will be involved with the event at Ikon Eastside on 31 October, so it is important that you get along to that.

Finally, and for those of you who are reading this and saying “But, it’s not fair, I don’t live in Birmingham, I live in London. Why isn’t there ever any fun stuff in London?” I can tell you that 7 Inch Cinema people will be bringing their own brand of slightly small moving images to the “Abbey pub” in London’s Kentish Town, on 20 October. Now stop whining.

All The Rage
I have had the honour of having some of my writing appear in a futuristically pdf magazine called All The Rage. This downloadable and printable publication is edited by the same person responsible for a humorous book called How to Worry Friends and Inconvenience People, which we all hope everyone will be buying for everyone else this Christmas.

Leaves turning colours other than green before falling in heaps in the park
Walk, look, kick, listen, smile: autumn.

What appealed to him about the Underground was the idea of descending into the earth in one part of the city and then shortly afterwards emerging up and out onto the street in a completely different place. This was teletransportation for the industrial age. But he subsequently realised that this was essentially a love of the novelty, as his visits to London were always brief, and few and far between. Since living in a city with a Metro he had become bored of the lack of visual stimuli in these tunnels. “I am not a mole”, he would say to himself, sometimes a little too loudly, as he rattled through the darkness.

Similarly, for years he preferred the option on trains of facing away from the direction of travel, watching the landscape that he had travelled through spread itself out in front of him. The smooth unwinding quality of train travel neutralises the need to anticipate your path to avoid motion sickness, and there are simple strategic advantages to the rear-facing seats. There is a sense, however illusory, that taking the train’s momentum with your back securely nestled against the seat cushion will afford greater protection in the event of a crash. In addition the relative unpopularity of facing backwards gives those who opt for it a greater choice of seating, and increases the probability that our precious personal space will not be invaded by another passenger. (This raises the question of why being invaded from the front is considered less objectionable than from the side. The answer I think lies somewhere in the unconscious belief that the inevitable games of train-footsie that are played with the facing passenger are nevertheless preferable to contact along the vulnerable and intimate flank, with its ticklish waist-ribcage-armpit regions.)

But long periods spent in compulsory use of commuter trains had gradually eroded his contentment with the rear-facing seats, and he had eventually arrived at the conclusion that it was not for nothing that evolution had placed our eyes relentlessly together and forward-facing, and that, consequently, there was indeed something unsettling about not watching where you were going.

If you want something to represent the stupidity and pointlessness of contemporary existence, then I suggest you look to the gunk that arrives day and night in my Thunderbird inbox.

I was briefly cheered, however, when I noticed a message this morning. The header said it was from “Digby Faucett”, though the content of the letter suggests he was in a state of excitement, and was clearly confused:

Hello Digby
yes, YES!.. I finally have a huge penis

Frode Danko
[link]

I have nothing to add at this stage.

Subject: Re: Booker Prize special
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:37:45 +0100 (BST)
From: care@ladbrokes.com <care@ladbrokes.com>
To: Peter Fletcher [email]

Dear Mr Fletcher,

Thank you for your e-mail.

I regret to inform you that this is a bet we will not be covering.

If we can be of any further assistance, please contact us again and
we will be more than happy to help you.

Yours sincerely,

[name]
Customer Services

Original Message Follows:
————————
Hello

You have odds for the Longlisted Booker titles both for outright winner
and to reach the shortlist.

Would it be possible to receive odds for the inverse, i.e. I would like to
bet that e.g. On Chesil Beach will NOT reach the shortlist (the current
odds make this tempting).

I have spoken to one of your helpful telephone consultants, who was
very informative and helpful. I am aware that this sort of bet is “negative”,
but he advised me to write and ask just in case.

Thanks

Peter

Large billboard posters around my city recently advertised a Lexus saloon with the following slogan:

MOVES YOU In more ways than one.

Can you see what they’ve done there? I was tempted to explain how the slogan worked, and why I thought it was a clever use of words, but then I realised that, like all of the best slogans, it “speaks for itself”.

This set me off thinking about the names of cars. Why is it, for example, that while there are many instances of cars named after cats, there are, to the best of my knowledge, no instances of cars named after dogs?

Whilst I’m not expecting the branding people to counter the elegance and coiled sexuality implicit in the word “Jaguar” with something like “Labrador” or “Basset”, there are surely suitable dog breeds that can be harvested for this use.

“Bulldog” - resolutely British 4×4

“Retriever” - reliable city runaround

“Whippet” - nippy little two-seater

And so on.

Ford, in fact, could do worse than selecting all their car names by sticking a pin in a big list of dog breeds and just going for it. Indeed, they already have done far worse. Who, for example, came up with the bizarre plan of naming their cars after pornographic magazines? Were they furtively working their way up through the range, culminating in an executive saloon called the “Ford Mayfair”, before someone spotted it? Perhaps then they had to lie low for a while, opting for the more innocuous Spanish theme with names like “Granada” and “Sierra”, reminding their bosses of happy days spent knocking a golf ball up and down the Costa del Sol. The wags had the last laugh though, managing to slip “Cortina” past the board, and ensuring that the classic 1970s saloon would forever go by the name of the “Ford Curtain”.

They were back at it with the “Probe” of course. As close to calling a car the Ford Looks Like A Penis Driven By A Prick as you are likely to get. John Hurt did the adverts, only a few years after he had been the voice of the AIDS euphemism.

My favourite though is probably the mysterious “Ka”. The counter-intuitive marketing intelligence of giving a car a name that not only nobody knows how to pronounce, but also makes you sound like an idiot however you try. I should know, I bought one. The salesmen had clearly given up and just spelt out the letters, as if they were talking about an adult concept within earshot of a pre-literate child: “John, this gentleman would like a K-A, do we have one in red?” Of course, given the manufacturer’s track record, and the fact that for all we knew “ka” might actually be Hungarian for “good fisting”, this was probably a sensible policy.

I have changed the default time settings of this website to GMT.

It is the right thing to do.

I am not a budgerigar.

I’ve grown tired of all of the kind words and fantastic offers sent to me by computers. If nothing else when I look at the site stats it makes me look much more popular than I really am. So I’ve turned off the comments, for now at least. Except for this post.

Because I do still want to hear from you, the actual person who is really reading this sentence.

Talk to me.

At lunchtime yesterday I was forced to conclude that I did not have anything in my kitchen or food storage areas that I wanted for lunch. This was because I did not have any fish and chips from the chip shop.

And I’m glad because my trip to the chip shop was not only an opportunity to get a bit of exercise and see what was going on “on the street”, but also resulted in me learning something.

I had to wait for the chip shop people to cook the fish and chips for me. I didn’t mind as this meant that my dinner would be fresh, so I sat down at one of the metal table and chairs. A man was in the shop, but he was not buying fish and chips, or waiting, or considering his purchase. He was a tall man, with very straight fair hair, and he was wearing a suit, a white t-shirt (which was also being used as a sunglasses hanger) and quite pointy shoes. He was slowly and carefully, you could say laboriously, putting blobs of Blu-tack on the backs of laminated posters and sticking them to the wall. The posters were of all the different sorts of kebab that you could buy in the shop.

As I watched, he re-affixed a laminated photocopy of an article from the local paper which said that the fish and chip shop was, on balance, quite good. This article has been on the wall for a few months - this was not my first visit and I had read it before - and so the man must have taken it down to make room for the big kebab posters, and then put it back in a different place. There was also a postcard which was an advert for people who wanted to earn more money selling make-up round the houses. The man turned this over in his hand suspiciously a few times before sticking one big blob of Blu-tack in the middle and pushing it to the wall, neatly, underneath the article.

His job, I concluded, was going round fish and chip shops and rearranging their wall displays to accommodate newer and larger photographs of assorted kebab meat. He went about his work in a thorough, courteous and professional manner. Modern life has many folds and crenellations. I was not afraid.