A while ago, when I was watching The Thick of It while slightly inebriated, I decided that it would be a really good idea to obtain an embroidered patch featuring Malcolm Tucker, and sew it onto my viola case. The reasons for this should be best known to myself, but I have no recollection of what they were.
A search for such an item on the internet proved disappointing (although I did find a couple of Malcolm Tucker button-badges on eBay). However, I was convinced that this item ought to exist. If I wanted it, surely thousands of others would as well..?
I became a little obsessed. I Googled and emailed a lot, and finally I can bring you The Completely Limited Edition Only 50 Of These Currently Exist In The World Embroidered Malcolm Tucker Patch:
I thought that other people might like one too, so if you would like Your Own Personal Malcolm Tucker, for just £3.99 (plus £0.75 postage and packing) you can buy one using this exciting PayPal button:
It measures approximately 4″ not-quite-square, and you can sew it onto your bag, your jeans pocket, your viola case, your pillow or your best friend, or just stand it on your mantelpiece.
Recently I’ve noticed my Facebook feed has often been peppered with statuses [stati?] along the lines of “has only two weeks left of her twenties, eeek!”, or “has turned thirty and it’s OK, it really is just the same on the other side.” Usually they’re accompanied by reassuring comments from people who have already completed their third decade, and are living proof that, oddly enough, one does not immediately require a zimmerframe and a blue rinse from here on.
So being 30 is OK. People are saying it’s OK. But still, a big deal is made about it, as with the end/beginning of any decade. It’s the round number thing. But it’s only a round number because we use base ten, we must remind ourselves. If we were counting in base twelve, we wouldn’t be thirty. We’d still be 26. And if we lived on Mars and counted in base 12 we’d be something entirely different. (I’m not going to take the time to work this one out, because I’m nearly 30 and I don’t have time to waste what’s left of my life doing it.) Humans seem oddly obsessed with these round numbers, although there are exceptions, such as whoever it was who wrote out π to 100 decimal places on the back of a toilet door in Manchester station.
It would be nice celebrate a πth birthday, although I suppose most people would be too young to understand what was happening. A π x 10th birthday might be better. I intend to calculate when I will be exactly 31.4159265 and have a party. I hope it’s in the summer, as my birthday’s in October and the weather is usually rubbish and by the time I’ve got up and feel ready to leave the house it always gets dark within about two hours. (Actually I’ve been considering changing my birthday to August or something. I think that, sadly, all I’d really need to do would be change it on Facebook and everyone would believe me.)
π aside, why are we so hung up on the number 30? I’ve read several articles about musicians who are in their twenties, being successful, and the journalist feels it necessary to state something along the lines of “[name of artist] is inevitably heading towards 30″ [really? you don't say..] ” – what are his/her plans before then?” It’s as if a) once someone is 30, that’s it: they have had it (in the pop music industry, maybe this is true…) or b) they must have achieved x, y and z before they are 30, or they are Not Going To Be Allowed To Continue.
But really, who cares? If they are doing good, interesting work, does anyone actually mind how old they are? If it’s someone making real art rather than being a piece of fluff with a microphone (again, I suppose I must refer to a certain portion of the pop music industry) – I don’t think their fans are suddenly going to shout, “Eeew! Old!” and stop buying their records just because of their age.
But nevertheless, the media, society and popular culture all scream that it’s time to panic: it’s the end of our “carefree” twenties, youth and beauty have peaked and we are supposed to be doing sensible things like buying houses and getting married and having babies and looking worn out and buying carpet cleaner. And if we are not doing these things, we are Behind. We are not properly mature, we have failed in what is expected of us as human beings who are fit to mix with polite society. Or, as I like to put it, A Complete Load of Bollocks.
I think being 30 is actually going to be brilliant.
I don’t know for certain as I haven’t had my suspicions confirmed by anyone who is over 30 (and perhaps I’m being naively optimistic – I am, after all, still in my twenties. Just.), but here is a generalised version of what I hope happens:
So you’re 30 and you’re still a vegetarian / not planning to have children / a communist / a librarian / planning your entire life around Star Trek conventions / continuing to make art even though it doesn’t make Loads Of Money™ / not going to learn to drive? Maybe people who thought otherwise will now realise that actually it’s not “a phase”, you won’t “grow out of it” and you’re not necessarily going to “feel differently about it when you’re older”. Also: it is fun at this point to demonstrate an actual “phase”. When I turn thirty I am going eat only seaweed and dress as a zebra for exactly two months, and then stop.
Family members still telling you what to do? Instead of “[insert name of relative], I am twenty-six!” you can now say, “I am thirty.” Use a calm, deep voice. They will be so shocked that they will never tell you what to do, ever again. (Well, hopefully.)
Apparently, it’s nicer than being in your twenties. If you Google ‘good things about being 20′ versus ‘good things about being 30′ there is a striking difference in the search results. The 30 year olds are much more positive, although I’m not sure whether there are more forums in which 30 year olds are declaring how great it is because they were terribly worried just beforehand and want to prove to everybody and themselves that it’s OK. Or whether it’s possibly because the 20 year olds are all out having a marvellous time being 20 rather than wasting time crowing about it on the internet. But really, who does have a completely fantastic time in their twenties? Some people, maybe, but circumstances are against it. You’re expected to behave like an adult, but sometimes still treated like a child, plus there’s the pressure of these being the best years of your life, worsened by people muttering things like ‘Youth is wasted on the young’ in the background. Talk about confusing.
Maybe you’re finally regarded as Having Existed Long Enough To Be Taken Seriously. When I was 9, a supply teacher read a book called “Dogger” to our class. All the way through it she pronounced the name of the eponymous toy dog in the story as “Dodger”. I put up my hand halfway through and said that I thought maybe it should be pronounced as it was spelt, and that I had the book at home, and was told off, presumably for impertinence or something. And I knew I was right, despite her insisting quite firmly, “No, it’s Dodger“. It was extremely annoying, but I couldn’t do anything about it because I was 9. I’d have respected her more both then and now if she’d taken my point rather than just automatically refused to allow a child to undermine her authority, but as things are I am still slightly resenting it twenty-one years later.
This sort of thing shouldn’t really continue into our twenties, but I think it does to an extent. If you are in your twenties, you are described and labeled as “young”. It’s probably supposed to be some sort of compliment or at least a positive thing half the time, but I’ve met a lot of people I think have made assumptions about my competence and experience because of how old they thought I was. (Think women who work in offices who couldn’t understand how I could possibly typeset a letter correctly and unsupervised when I was a temp who hadn’t had Office Training. Who I then had to show how to operate Excel spreadsheets which they were supposed to know about as part of their Permanent Job.) I’m fed up of being “young”. I just want to be, you know, a person.
Not that I regret my twenties – I think I negotiated them reasonably well, had quite a nice time, and I still thoroughly enjoy hanging around with people who are still having theirs and have plenty left to go yet. But Me Being 30 sounds perfectly all right. I’m not panicking.
(Aaaargh! I have grey hairs and facial lines! And a knee that clicks when I kneel on it! Oh. Oh, actually I have had these since I was 24.)
Acknowledgements: Thank you to Debbie for [unknowingly] contributing to and inspiring parts of this post over a nice cup of hot chocolate; and to Tom for suggesting I can have a π x 10th birthday, even though I’ve missed my πth.
I find it hard to believe that in my early twenties I managed to blog around three times per week. These days, due to time-restrictions, I barely manage once a month. What did I do back then? The trouble with blogging this sporadically is that when I write a blog post, I feel that I really ought to be writing about something of monumental importance, rather than just, well, a blog post.
Anyway. I’m going to write about something that isn’t monumentally important, in order to take the pressure off.
Yesterday evening I played at a ceilidh. Prior to the gig, there were a couple of setbacks. Firstly, the accordion player’s knee was badly damaged in an incident which apparently involved the concertina player and a towel. Then the guitarist, who’d organised it (the ceilidh, not the knee-damaging incident), phoned the rest of the band at about 5pm to say that it was a 7pm start rather than 8pm. Minor panic ensued. However, despite both of these things, we got to the venue almost on time, set up and played the first half, as usual.
Then there was a break for the buffet. [At this point a slightly scary man admired my new spats (yes, those are the actual ones, and I am possibly more pleased about them than any other item of legwear ever), spent the rest of the evening making comments about them and possibly may have winked once. But this is a digression.]
On the buffet table, [insert fanfare here] there were two little bottles of hand sanitiser! Somebody had clearly thought this through. At ceilidhs, the formula is usually dance, eat a buffet, dance. (Generally overlaid throughout with drinking.) During the dances there is a great deal of hand-contact, often with quite a lot of people (especially if there’s a grand chain involved, or if it’s a progressive dance in which dancers change partner every time through). That’s potentially a lot of free transport for germs, immediately followed by the potential-transporters eating a bunch of food.
Quite a few of ceilidhs that I’ve played at serve a hog-roast in the middle, eaten in sandwiches. That means eaten with your fingers, which have just been holding lots of other fingers – and I don’t see lots of people queuing up to wash their hands before the buffet: they go straight from the dance floor to the food. And there isn’t usually any hand sanitiser. Yikes.
So: hand sanitiser is definitely a good thing for ceilidhs, especially if, like me, one has buggered up one’s immune system by having ten serial colds over winter. I urge all ceilidh bands and also normal people to suggest it to anyone they know who might be organising one: if it becomes standard practice we could collectively save the NHS what will probably turn out to be a really small amount of money, but, you know, it’s still something…
(Also. While you’re there. Tell them that Standard Ceilidh Organising Practise is to provide the band with some nice Australian Shiraz, a good quality cheesecake, interesting salads with decent vinaigrette, assorted delicious proteins and carbohydrates, heated seats, disco lights, and a party bag to take home. But mainly this is about the hand sanitiser.)
I spend a lot of time thinking I really ought to improve in all three of these areas, but not knowing how to go about it efficiently. However, I have come up with one idea which will cover all three: Only Drink Alcohol When It’s Free. Thus, whenever a drink is required, I must attend some sort of event such as a gallery or exhibition opening, or aftershow party (which will lead to networking), or else be playing music at a function which provides free booze (which will lead to financial gain, in addition to the money saved by not buying any alcohol).
The problem with this theory, of course, is that wine at gallery openings, functions etc. is often horrible. Therefore, in order to obtain good wine, only the opening parties of very high-end galleries and exhibitions must be attended (leads to networking with more influential people, although after a while they may notice that I’m only there when there is free wine, which might be bad), and only functions at which the wine is good must be played at (which either means that the people will have so much money that they can afford nice wine and also to pay the musicians more, or that they will have spent the entire budget on the wine and won’t pay the musicians anything. Hmm.)
The details need work, I think, but maybe this could solve three of my problems at once…
The phone rang. I answered it and a woman said, “Hello, is that My Button Dot Com? I’m on your website.”
“Erm, no..? Do you mean Button Jewellery Dot Co Dot UK?”
“Well I typed in My Button Dot Com and your name and number came up. Anyway, did you have a stall at the Clothes Show at the NEC?”
“No.”
“Oh right, well my friend got this necklace there and said it was from My Button. Are you sure you didn’t go to the NEC?”
“Yes, quite sure.”
“And you don’t know anyone who went to the NEC?”
“No. Which website did you say you were on?”
“Well I’m not actually on it any more, it was on my friend’s computer a few weeks ago.”
I typed in mybutton.com on my browser. It was one of those ‘domain is for sale’ sites.
“…anyway,” the woman continued, apparently still utterly convinced that I was the right person to talk to, “what I’m after is a necklace made from purple and lime green hearts. Do you make something like that?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t make anything like that.”
“Hmm. Well that’s very strange.”
Well, actually, given everything that had been said in the conversation up to that point, it really wasn’t very strange.
Eventually I persuaded her that perhaps the website she was after was onebuttonuk.com. I have no idea whether this website stocks necklaces made from purple and lime green hearts but it least it got me off the hook…
Just before Christmas I went to a partial family gathering / my mum’s birthday party near Dumfries: [these are phone-camera pics so not of amazing quality...] [After the pictures, by the way, there is some more writing.]
The pond. It’s heart-shaped because it was made as a Valentine’s present, so the story goes…
My mum experimenting with her new phone. And some lens flare. But that’s my fault.
Frozen puddles.
Beside the Solway Firth was an Unexpected Pram.
A very hairy hedge. There’s lots of lichen around this area – presumably an indication of the air not being very polluted.
This photo was taken at 11am. Note the Gloom.
These are some round bits of concrete at the edge of the sea at Mersehead Sands, which are possibly old bits of pipe. They get photographed rather too often by members of my family.
Some more 11am gloom.
A particularly good bit of gloom, I thought.
A barn being all Dramatic. In the Gloom.
The reason for the trip was primarily my mum’s birthday, and visiting uncle/aunt/cousins and generally Being In Scotland, which is one of my favourite activities. It was also, for me, in place of Having To Do Christmas. We spent said Nice Family Time with meals, walks and merriment in Scotland, without having all the prescriptive parts of Christmas, which irritate me. Aside from not being religious (which apparently isn’t a valid excuse for not celebrating Christmas) I don’t like having to eat specific things and drink fizzy wine far too early in the morning because it’s “traditional”, and particularly don’t enjoy the TV being on, the awful Christmas music that always finds a way in somehow, and the bizarre late mealtimes. However, I appreciate that some people do like all of these things. So rather than go along and complain and be grumpy and scroogelike, or attempt to convince everyone concerned that we should rebelliously not have turkey, but Thai curry, and should not turn the television on all day but instead spend the days listening to, say, the entire output of Rammstein, I opted out. I didn’t do Going To Visit Family For Christmas. I didn’t do anything for Christmas at all. In my house, we had a completely normal day, did some music work, ate nice uncomplicated food, and I was in an incredibly good mood throughout. My mum phoned me from another uncle’s house after she’d been for a Nice Walk, had a sherry and was about to help peel the sprouts. I could hear Christmas music in the background. She seemed to be having a perfectly nice time without me, but sounded a little baffled: ‘You mean you aren’t doing anything special today at all?’ But ‘not doing anything special’ felt somehow more like doing something special than actually doing something special would have done. If you see what I mean.
Incidentally, on the way home from the Not-Christmas trip to Dumfries, I had an hour stop-over at Carlisle station and visited a tapas bar there which I have always wanted to go to. Here is the cup of tea that I had there:
This is the state of the alley between my house and Sainsbury’s supermarket:
In a word, eek. Getting across this is like crossing a very bad, lumpy ice rink. It is snow-that-was-just-starting-to-melt-and-suddenly-refroze, which I don’t think there’s a word for. I have found a nice Wikipedia article on different types of snow, but disappointingly the type pictured above seems only to fit under the term ‘ice’. I was really hoping it would called something exciting.
Next time I make it across the rink to the supermarket I am considering making an extra purchase of a large bag of economy salt, and gritting myself a little path down the middle.
Occasionally within my ponderings here, I refer to a place called The Lace Shop. This was my two-day-a-week workplace for a year or so, several years ago, until I was suddenly given the ‘I’m going to have to let you go’ phonecall because the boss’s daughter wanted my job. I wasn’t actually that upset. Clearing out the images folders on my computer has presented me with some long-forgotten pictorial reminders that it was not a healthy place to spend any time:
This is the view of the front shop area. In the centre is a selection of polyester embroidered tablecloths and table runners. [Before working here I was actually unaware of the existence of table runners, and I still don't really understand what they're for.] All around the edges are very alarming porcelain dolls, teddy bears whose purpose is to adorn wedding cakes, and other such abominations. Particularly horrible are embroidered cushions with slogans on such as ‘If friends were flowers, I’d pick you’ – which I personally think is rather ominous and passive-aggressive, but a lot of annoying women would come in, read them out loud and say, ‘Ooh-isn’t-that-lovely’. Always in the same tone of voice.
This is the ‘Rear Showroom’. It did not, as its name suggests, contain any rears on display, which I suppose is either disappointing or fortunate depending on one’s viewpoint and the quality of the available rears. However, it did have yet more, even nastier dolls, some embroidered cushions, damask tablecloths and some lace pictures, mostly religious scenes. The latter were certainly a contender for Worst Thing in the Shop – I’m still undecided.
Some more dolls, including Henry VIII and some of his wives. A woman once came in and asked whether the shop sold any dolls of Princess Diana. I said that it didn’t. She was very put out. She stomped back through the door muttering, ‘Well, you’ve got Henry the Eighth… it’s not that unreasonable.’ She may have been a bit offended because I didn’t do a very good job of Not Finding Her Request At All Amusing.
This is the handmade lace. I was supposed to somehow insinuate that this was made in Nottingham, England, on the orders of The Boss. When it arrived in its packets, it smelt distinctly of patchouli and spices, and had Indian writing on the labels. So, er, yes, definitely made in Nottingham. I do not think. In the mirror you can see me taking the photograph, wearing the obligatory hideous maroon tabard.
After working in this place for a while I gradually became aware that actually the vast majority of the stock in this shop – mainly sold to tourists as ‘English souvenirs’ arrived in boxes that stated quite firmly that although the souvenirs themselves might have the name of the town I live in printed on them, they were made in China. The Boss told me that if the customers asked where anything was made, I was to claim ignorance.
This made me feel rather disgusted, both with myself for going along with it, and for the shop’s owners for enforcing this fabrication. American tourists who said, ‘I hope it isn’t made in China’ left the shop with ‘local’ souvenirs that had been shipped halfway across the world to be sold here.
It seems ridiculous that a town which used to be a centre of creation – it used to make railway engines, chocolate and various other things – now mainly trades in tourism relating to its history, while manufacture declines and “local” souvenirs are made on another continent. Of course this isn’t solely the fault of this town itself, and I don’t feel qualified to go into the complex national and global causes and effects which surround the issue. However, during the quiet, customer-free and boss-free periods while I was working in the shop, I wrote a song inspired by this. After my job there was transferred to the daughter of The Boss I was very tempted to post a CD recording of it through the shop door, but since it would be difficult to have it performed and recorded by Abba – the only music ever played in the shop when I wasn’t around – I don’t think it would have been listened to. It’s called ‘Tourist Trail’ and hasn’t been recorded in the studio yet, but here’s a live video from a Pillowfish gig earlier this year:
Somehow, despite having had at least four colds in a row about a month ago and then finally recovering into a veritable whirlwind of slothful curmudgeonry, I am ill again. I would’ve thought that I’d had most of the germs by now and become immune to them, but no, apparently not. They just had to mutate into a new variety and come and inhabit me gleefully, as if I was a theme park, or Butlins-for-Germs. Hmph.
Anyway, today I was on my way to the supermarket at the end of my road, in my pyjamas, in order to obtain some sick-person’s food [fresh tagliatelle and freshly made pasta sauce in little tubs, which are Expensive and Cheating so being ill is my main excuse for ever eating them] when I heard some raucous singing from high up. It came from approximately the same position as some whistling I’d heard the day before, which had implanted ‘We’ll drink a drink, a drink / to Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink / The saviour of the human ra-ha-hace’ irrevocably in my brain for the rest of the afternoon. Foolishly, I looked up. And immediately the owner of the raucous singing, a luminously-vested builder, yelled, ‘Cheer up! It might never happen!’
We will pause in this scintillating story now, in order to discuss the immense awfulness of this phrase. I don’t know whether it is a localised English thing [does it even happen in the rest of the UK?] or whether it happens further afield as well, but here it is used regularly, usually to strangers, and is accepted as A Normal Thing To Say.
Actually – we will pause within this pause in order to diffuse any assumptions that receiving such a statement from a builder is better than The Usual Sexual Harassment. Firstly, I have walked past a lot of builders in my life, and never once have any of them commented on my physical appearance, either in a complimentary or offensive manner. Well, at least, they haven’t done it within earshot. I am wondering whether its occurrence is actually an urban myth, or so much of a stereotype that they teach new builders during their training that they must never do it , because it embarrasses everybody. Secondly, I was wearing pyjamas, a duffel coat, Timberland boots, a large green scarf and my knitted hat with earflaps. There was not much to sexually harass. Thirdly, despite the fact that I find strangers commenting on my physical appearance – in any way whatsoever – Highly Embarrassing*, I’m not sure whether it would have actually been more offensive if they’d yelled ‘Nice Tits!’ or something. Because ‘cheer up! It might never happen!’ is offensive to me in so many, many ways…
For completely obvious starters, it’s really rude to tell a complete stranger that they look miserable. It is even ruder, and hugely callous, to mock them for it – generally speaking, people look miserable because “it” has happened. I don’t know how many people on receiving end of this phrase ever turn around and yell back perfectly truthfully that the reason they look miserable is, for example, because someone they know has just died. I mean, people die quite often. I imagine that if someone did actually respond this way, the ‘cheer-up-it-might-never-happen’-er would be somewhat mortified and apologetic, unless they really were doing it maliciously. Admittedly, I was only looking miserable this time because a) I was ill and b) that’s just what my face does, but still. It could’ve been for any reason.
The thing is, these people who say this thing aren’t usually doing it to be rude or offensive or unkind. They’re doing it because they consider themselves to be Amusing Cheeky Chappies. And they are somehow conditioned into thinking that if someone looks sad, this is the appropriate response. But the thing is, it doesn’t actually make any sense.
Clichéd stock phrases irritate me, in general. They make me feel as if the entire world is a giant episode of Blind Date, in which we are all pretending to be making up the things we are saying as we go along, but have actually had them all scripted in a totally obvious and painfully embarrassing way beforehand. However, if they have some sort of historical meaning that can be explained by the user when questioned by someone who has no idea what they are talking about, I suppose they are not too bad. It’s when they have become normalised but are still nonsense and cannot be explained, yet people use them without thinking, that they really bug me. Imagine this:
Annoying Person: “Cheer up! It might never happen!”
Me: “What might never happen?”
Annoying Person: “Um. It. Might never happen.”
Me: “But what is ‘it’?”
Annoying Person: “The thing that you are looking so miserable about.”
Me: “How can you presume to know why I am looking miserable, and whether the cause of the misery is past, present or future?”
Annoying Person: “What? Bloody hell, it’s just, like, the thing you say when someone looks miserable. I mean, calm down…”
Another example of these weird phrases is ‘What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts’, sometimes abbreviated merely to ’swings and roundabouts’. It is often used in conversations with seemingly no connection to the subject matter, unless you know what it is supposed to mean. Apparently this phrase relates to such situations as paying less rent to live in a house further out of a town, but then having to pay more money in order to travel into the town [possibly in order to work and earn the money]. But it still makes no immediate sense. What does a person lose on swings? And what do they gain on roundabouts? I have lost things from my pockets while swinging on swings. I have gained a grazed knee falling off a roundabout, once when I was six. And at a remote farmhouse in Scotland, I was able to obtain a mobile phone signal for half a second by swinging very high on a swing suspended from a tree branch. They didn’t have a roundabout there, though.
Or: is it to do with going backwards and forwards on a swing, and rotating on a roundabout? You gain the forwards and backwards motion on the swing, yet lose the arguable advantage of also being able to rotate. On the roundabout, you can go in wonderful circles until dizzy, but will no more be able to go forwards and backwards and up and down in a lovely sweeping arc, as you did on the swing. Is this what it’s about? Am I close? Do people who actually use this phrase think about the meaning of what they are saying? I really, really hope so… But. Hmm.
Anyway, the next person who tells me to cheer up, and insist that I should do so because there is doubt as to whether the cause of my misery (which is so very definitely in the future) will actually occur, is going to receive the response ‘Swings and roundabouts’. They will be very, very baffled, because I will have used a familiar cliché completely inappropriately and it won’t make any sense at all. Ha.
*Apart from girls exchanging clothing-compliments as part of Female Bonding.
