I have few callers on my landline now. Today I had Twelve, not twelve callers but a company called Twelve, as the bloke told me before I had the chance to hang up. You recently answered a survey and said you sometimes play the Natinal Lottery, the man from Twelve said. This, of course, is a a lie. I do not and have never played the lottery. Well, I said, to stop him talking and give myself time to frame a response. Talking to cold callers has become an important part of my life, much as inviting Jehovah’s Witnesses in and talking to them used to be. That is false, I say. I am AGAINST the lottery. I say this with religious fervour. There was a pause. All right, said the man from Twlve and put the phone gently down, or clicked it gently off. As if to say, it’s a fair cop. The business of revealing the untruths of cold callers has become a necessary chore, a modern ritual. Which reminds me. I haven’t heard from the man who tells me that I or a member of my family have been involved in a minor or major accident recently.

More telephone fun today though. With BT this time. I now have Infinity, put in last week. Immediately no blue light on, no connection. And so, after a week of putting it off, the painful call to India fior technical support. The usual procedure. The verbal humiliation as he asks me questions using computer terminology I am unable to understand. He is trying to disguise the exasperation in his voice. For these people I must be some kind of mental pygmy. Then the physical humour where they ask you to manipulate random parts of the differemt hubs and sockets that the engineer installed last week. Me trying to unravel wires round the back of the hub whilst cradling the phone in my shoulder hollow. At least this time he did not ask me to find a long pin from among my household objects, insert it into a specific hub orifice and wiggle it around for thirty seconds.

peoplearerubbish.com

Red Nose Day a couple of days ago and the continuation of the remorseless self-fetichisation perpetrated by the BBC upon itself. I spend the evening avoiding all BBC outlets. I have nothing against charity but am not interested in various BBC hangers-on making dull exhibition of themselves in roles for which they have no discernable talent. I had always presumed they did it for free. I hear that might not even be true in some cases. It could be that I am rubbish for worrying about celebrities rather than celebrating the fact that money is raised for good causes.

Another BBC complaint: their obsession with so-called packages. Guests are invited to give their opinions but no-one can explore any issue because of constant trailing and mini-films exploring in slow motion (if it is sport, reshowing a goal or a race or a try with staccato imagery or in such a way that you can’t see it properly anyway). There’s no time left for the guests. More fetichising.

The Six O’clock News. Headlines.: The pound drops to a  four year low against the dollar! Picture of a graph and a grimacing pound heading downhill. Cue the newsreader: The pound sank to a new four year low against the dollar today. Cut to a reporter standing outside the Bank of England: So, Dermott, the pound sank to a four year low today. That’s right, Fiona. the pound sank to a new four year low today. It dropped one dollar 32 or whatever, which is the lowest against the dollar since March 2009 or whatever. Which represents a four year low. Back to the studio. Dermott’s in there with Fiona now. So, says Fiona, the pound sank today. Yes, says Dermott. It’s a four year low against the dollar. A couple more sentences. Then back to Fiona. Fiona swings her seat round for camera one. Thank you, Dermott. Dermott Whatsisname there with news of the pound sinking to a new four year low. And it’s not over there because half way throough the News we get the headines again and the revelation that the pound has dropped to a new four year low against the dollar. Arrrrgggghhhh!

peoplearerubbish.com

Last night I had a significant variation on a recurrent dream motif. In dreams I am often trying to dial a number but constantly missing my finger aim on the old style phone dial and so never getting to the end of the number to contact whoever it is at the end of the line, whatever shadowy figure half beast half human who represents the preoccupation of the moment or of a moment summoned up from my primeval past. I make countless attempts to dial the number but will always wake up before succeeding.

In last night’s reworking of this recurrent moment I am in possession of a mobile phone (dream iconography upgrade), but the key pad has diminished to just the top line 1,2,3, so that when last night I was trying to dial 999 it couldn’t work because there were no nines on the phone pad. I am now deeply integrated into technology. It inhabits my unconscious.

The other tiny issue that bothered me in the dream was that I only had 24p of credit left and I didn’t want to be cut off half way through my conversation with the police. They might do me for wasting police time. Lesson learnt; I put some credit on my phone this morning.

peoplearerubbish.com

There is a distinction between the so-called epistemic verbal mode and the deontic mode. The epistemic mode deals with alternative worlds which could exist instead of a given world at a given point in time (what may be). The deontic mode also deals with alternative worlds but they are ones which could develop out of a given world (what should be).

The world we act in is a ninuscule fraction of the eddy of possible alternatives that flurry around us. The shoulds, the woulds, the mights. Our doing world is a small thing, a tiny nucleus around which spins the realm of not doing, intending to do, fantasising abouit doing, fearing to do, forgetting to do. And perhaps, the more conscious and sensitive we are, the less the doing world impinges.

peoplearerubbish.com

I remember a few years ago being suddenly obliged to move into temporary accomodation, bundled out of the comfortable flat I’d been living in by a reversal of fortune and ending up in a rundown, unpleasant part of town, maybe even a dangerous part of town depending on your experience of topology. At the time, in the winter outside the council block waiting for  key, I registered how little anxiety I was feeling and how that must be the deadening of the feelings that comes with ageing.

I remember vividly how painful it was to get up early and go to work in the cold, how alien the outside world felt, how unfriendly was the world of work. Now I hardly feel that at all. I have either accomodated myself to the work or my life has just got easier.

And yet tonight I could not take the anxiety of the Real Madrid v Man Utd match. I left the pub fifteen minutes in and couldn’t even bear the radio. That’s about the deepest anxiety I have at the moment.

The real unpleasantnesses fade, the false ones grow. I must be doing something wrong.

peoplearerubbish.com

This afternoon I worried intermittently about the location of an “unquote” left off by some commentator on Radio Five Live. He had said that Suarez was quote the third best striker in Europe. But where was that unquote? Hours later I am still fretting about the quotation, which, in my mind, is still ambling merrily on with the gate of the unquote left yawning wide open.

Language probably causes me more heartburn than anything else.

Many Americans say that are “blessed” instead of lucky. Clearly a religious thing, as divine agency oversees all in a Panglossian universe. I insist on being lucky, not blessed.

Seen in the window of a fancy pub: stunningly private individual dining rooms for hire! Stunningly private. How stunning can privacy be?

The Ancient Sumerians had a cumulative genitive in their language. You added -ak at the end of a clause for the number of genitives in the phrase. So the cat of the son of the king would be sa’ adamu lugal ‘ak ‘ak. (cat son king of of). You can imagine the one-upmanhsip of a king with a lot of stuff (wives, children, trinkets, sheep) who would have a suite of aks at the end of his clauses. Loadsamoney! Akakakakaak!

Two linguists of Ancient Sumerian have different definitions for a part of speech found in certain literary texts. One names it the ‘frustrative ‘ case, corresponding to the expression ‘if only…’ (If only we had more sheep in the herd) Another, clearly more optimistic, calls it a ‘rhetorical, interrogative particle’ and interprets the meaning as ‘why not…?’ (why not get more sheep for the herd?) Frustrative or rhetorical, interrogative particle? Lucky or blessed? European or America? What type are you?

Sometimes I find myself listening to some poor soud pouring their heart out, unburdening themselves of terrible problems, debilitating illness, financial impasses, when what I am most concerned about is their confusion of imply and infer or their insistance in making nounns into verbs (to impact rather than make an impact) or verbs into adjectives ( the engineering work is on-going rather than going on). It is generally attested that Ancient Sumerian had only a limited number of adjectives. Might suit me better.

Language is important, but sometimes I wish I could just find it transparent.

Oh and yes, I did get a book about Ancient Sumerian for Christmas.

peoplearerubbish.com

The man who says to me down the phone ‘we have heard that you or a member of your family have been involved in a minor traffic accident’ phoned agin today. Sunday. The last time he phoned I was angry and said ‘No. You are lying.’ and ‘Fuck off!’ and slammed the phone down. The poor guy rang back immediately and said ‘you motherfucker’ to me before slamming down his phone or clicking it off on his switchoard or whatever. I felt bad afterwards. Poor guy. It wasn’t his fault he had to lie. So this time I didn’t want to be so brusque. When he said the time-worn words ‘we have heard that you or a member of your family have been involved in a minor traffic accident’ I said ‘Oh? Which member of my family is that? He said he didn’t have that information. Anyway, I ended up using the word ‘lie’ after which he changed his tack uselessly and said ‘perhaps it had been a household accident?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘No accidents. I and no member of my imaginary family have ever had any accidents.’ End of conversation.

He’ll phone again in acouple of weeks. I need to try another tack. It is a strain on my inventiveness.

peoplearerubbish.com

My dad told me that when he was in the war (the Second World War) he was running away from the Nazis (or was it the Communists?) and with his friends they got hold of some bikes but one of them couldn’t ride a bike and he ran behind them, but he couldn’t keep up and fell behind and eventually he got caught by the Naziz (or the Communists) and killed. He used to tell me that story to convince me how important it was to learn to ride a bike, because I couldn’t ride a bike. Still can’t. Though it did worry me, that story. What if I found myself in that position. I was a good runner, but surely not good enough to outpace the Nazis.

A few years ago I read Gunter Grass’s autobiography where he told a story about what happened to him in the war. He was a young Nazi soldier trapped in a house outside Berlin with some other German soldiers during the taking of Berlin by the Soviets at the end of the war. They found some bikes and after a brief discussion, they decided they would make a break for it on the bikes. But Gunter Grass couldn’t ride a bike (or was it that there weren’t enough of them?), so the captain told him to cover them as they rode off. The young Gunter Grass knew it was tantamount to a death sentence as they left him alone in the house with the Soviet army advancing. But as he watched his compatrots riding off over the brow of the hill he saw them all, everyone of them, shot down dead, picked off by a Soviet sniper. Grass panicked. He ran out of the back door of the house and ran and ran until he found a railway track, which he followed for miles and miles, until, remarkably, he met up with a company of his own army.

This time not riding a bike saved his life. The moral is that being rubbish sometimes works for you.

peoplearerubbish.com

I remember a few years ago (2001? 2002?) I was given an invitation to the press opening of the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. It was one weekday morning. I was free, so I went. There were about thirty or so journalists milling around where the artists’ works were exhibited. I remember it was the year the artist who did different coloured lights coming on and off won. None of the journalists were particularly bothered about looking at the work. Then, after about half an hour, the PRs came in and took everyone round the work, telling us what the intentions of the artists were and what was so interesting about the pieces. The journalists all took notes or recorded it on their dictaphones. Nobody looked at the art. We all took in what the PRs told us and produced it for the next day’s papers.

peoplearerubbish.com

In a passage from Proust where the character first falls in love with Gilberte, he explains how when he first saw her he was initially struck by her dark eyes, but when he went away he carried off with him the information that she was blond and so in his fancy he assumed she had blue eyes. Once his imagination got to work over the next few days he found himself in love with her blue eyes, blue eyes she has never possessed, did not possess and never would possess.

“Si elle n’avait pas eu des yeux aussi noirs… je n’aurais pas ete, comme je le fus, plus particulierement amoureux , en elle, de ses yeux bleus.”

(“If she had not had such dark eyes, I would never have been, as I was, so particularly in love with her blue eyes.”)

Proust. Du Cote de Chez Swann/Swann’s Way

What flimsy evidence do we cherish as basis for our deepest convictions?