We have just survived Bafta and Oscar season. This is a period of the year where I grip the remote of the telly with fevered intensity in case any footage of simpering, whimpering film people suddenly appears on the screen. I turn my head away from the culture sections of newspapers as though fleeing the Gorgon. There are Brit representatives, tasked with enacting all the standard cliches, to be versions of the stiff upper lip, the ineffectual fool, the mannered fop or the rampant jingoist. It could be a modern version of The School for Scandal. All we need are fake beauty spots, mice making their nests in hair-do’s and Keira Knightly arrving as a shepherdess accompanied by a retinue of goats. There are the weepers from I don’t know which Circle of Hell. The dreadful litanies of praise and remerciments. The selfie-itis. The fawning interviewers, dripping with the unctuous, viscid pus of self-abasement. I would find a particularly select zone of the inferno for these characters. The most vibrant fantasy that remains to me is that one day, for whatever far-away reason imaginable, I am interviewed at such an event, in the full glare of the flash bulbs, cushioned by the plush of the red carpet. How I would enjoy exhibiting my  monumantal disinterest, my monumental detachment. I truly believe there would be a market for such a reaction. Please, you neutral and unexcitable hoardes, let me be your champion.

peoplearerubbish.com

The richest man in Italy died the other day. He had a personal fortune of 15 Billion Euros. His name was Mr Ferraro. He made his fortune from two main products: ferraro rocher chocolates and nutella. I suppose it is nutella that is inside the ferraro rocher. Yesterday I noticed there was a reduction on nutella at Lidl, so I bought a jar for the first time in many years. I don’t know whether the reduction was an hommage to the late Mr Ferraro or just a fortuitous coincidence. I’ve had the nutella on my breakfast rye bread yesterday and this morning and just had another slice with a cup of tea. I think the charm has now worn off. It is a nasty glutinous substance. How melancholy it must have been for Mr Ferraro to look at the vats of this stuff and feel his identity subsumed by it. As a seventeen year old on my first trip abroad in a so-called youth camp in Southern Germany where I went to practice my German and helped build a kinderspielplatz (children’s playground) with about twenty 18-30 year olds – I had lied about my age to get in – nutella was on offer at breakfast. It was my first exposure. It was liberating to eat this goo for breakfast. At home it would have been frowned on. To a seventeen-year-old It represented the continent and doing what I wanted. There was also apricot jam, I recall. Mmm. Fancy a bit if that next time I’m in Lidl.

peoplearerubbish.com

More worrying trends at Tesco. On top of all the other problems that Tesco is facing these days comes the issue, which I unearthed this morning, of its clubcards not conforming to models of French grammatical syntactic constructional forms. When you are puting your clubcard voucher in to get your miserly gift (this time it was a paltry £2) and you free points vouchers for, say, a Tesco lemon-flavour washing-up liquid, the question that was preying on my mind and which I had never resolved was: do I deposit these vouchers before or after beeping my clubcard through? It turns out you do it after! I am, to say the least, shocked and dismayed by this turn of events. My only guide to what should have been the corect procedure comes from French grammar. Consider the construction: je ne le lui ai pas dit (I have not told him that). Here all the what I might call addenda (him/ that / the negative element) are enfolded within the warm embrace of the basic verbal clause (the je and the dit, I and told). So if the verb is the clubcard and the addenda (pronouns, negatives etc) the vouchers, it would make sense for vouchers to be posited before the beeping of the warm inclusive mother clubcard. But apparently not. Yet more incompetence from our premier store! Oh, I restrained myself from taking this up with the manager this time. After all, they seemed ignorant of Zola’s depiction of the regular shifting of goods through a store to keep customers confused that Tesco was still perpetrating almost 150 years after Zola’s big store novel Au Bonheur des Dames when I brought up this age-old malpractice. However, I don’t know how much longer this can go on.

peoplearerubbish.com

My upstairs neighbours were noisy again last night. Every few weeks they have a social get-together and even though they take their shoes off (my request; the clipp-clopping on the wooden floor sounds like a tribe of toddlers parading round in their mum’s high-heels) and don’t do music, they still find a way to keep me awake. What I have found is that as the evening progresses the main man shouts his jokes rather than makes them, his humour being dependent on volume, and his accolytes scream or shout their allegiance back. Listening to the sounds from the floor below give you a strange idea of what goes on up there. The parties, to my nether-ears, feature the shouting of funny stories, the rhythmic slamming of doors (it must be some kind of a parlour game), the dull thuds of large packages or boxes being dropped onto the floor (they must be sorting through their amazon deliveries) and the constant spilling of ball-bearings onto the parquet. If that is what they are really doing till two in the morning, they go up in my estimation. Anyway, in the end, I struggled up from my bed, went off to the little cupboard at the back of the bathroom where I keep appliances, and, as usual, treated them to some fierce shocks with the broom handle on my living room ceiling. The funny story from the main man stopped or must suddenly have been spoken at everyday volume and didn’t seem quite so funny anymore. I went back to bed.

peoplearerubbish.com

This is a guest blog from Boxette

The concept of going to the office is a bit 1980s these days. Habitual wearers of Stan Smiths are more likely to be found hanging out in places where the walls are stripped bare of plaster, manfully downing flat whites and broadcasting their achievements on the free WiFi, tweet by tedious tweet.

But what about the non-hipsters who also work virtually? They may not own a pair of rollerblades; they may not like Apple products; they may be sensitive to caffeine. But these refugees from Croydon, Dagenham and Merton still need a safe place to roost.

So it is for me, Nigel and Terry. For several years we’ve held strategy sessions in an eatery on the upper floors of Victoria Station. This café, named after one half of a 1960s pop/folk duo that is sadly no longer on speaking terms with the other member, is arguably the most dismal meeting place of its kind. No natural light; plastic booth seating you have to crawl in and out from; formica tables and wipe-down menus. All the atmosphere of an airport terminal. And service that can best be described as disinterested.

I used to ride the escalator to this place with a sinking heart. Here we would lay out our spread sheets, worry about Euro emissions legislation while I tried to catch the waiter’s eye to ask for green tea. They would never have green tea. Each time I toyed with the idea of bringing my own teabags for the next meeting, but would never remember. Within two hours I would feel lightheaded, suffering from sick-building syndrome, or too much hot chocolate. I would feel grubby. I would be questioning my career trajectory.

And then, one day as I rode the escalator past the mobile phone sellers, gold buyers and accessorisors, I had the shock of my life. The café was being ripped apart. Torn down. Remodelled. The one constant in our working calendar had closed.

At first I felt euphoric. That’ll show them, Terry and Nigel. Now we’ll have to go somewhere they don’t serve herbal tea with milk. Somewhere where we’ll feel in command of our destiny.

Real life isn’t like fantasy. The three of us were forced to traipse through shopping malls outside the station looking for somewhere to sit. Finally we found a popular café franchise with a French name. Magnifique? Non. The table was too small for Terry’s spread-sheets. We jostled for elbow room. The waiter cleared away our cups too quickly and the room was just too popular to hear yourself think.

That’s when I learnt to value what I had lost. The old café was so sparsely populated that you could have the table as long as you liked. It had all the ambience of a tired office building. Then I had an epiphany: an old-style office, with its broken ceiling tiles and tepid water cooler was what we had been subconsciously seeking all along, we peripatetic work-from-homers.

Out of nostalgia I climbed the escalator up Victoria Station the other week. A cosy little bistro had colonised the space, all soft fabrics and amber lighting. The kind of lighting by which you can’t read the small print menu. Background music that would distract from serious conversation, and a waiter with an expression that said ‘Come hither’. Not the kind of welcome I was hoping for.

I suppose they call it progress, but Terry, Nigel and I have been forced into a new kind of Odyssey as we search, in vain, for a new unfashionable space in which to ply our trade.

peoplearrerubbish.com

I was walking near Kensington High St the other day and saw the faces of a young Japanese couple beaming with glee at something behind me. As I turned round to see what they had seen they were both eagerly taking out their ipods to capture the auspicious moment. Behind me was the office, London headquarters maybe, of EMI. And I had been taking it for granted for years! I live with a default distrust that applies especially to corporations. How do you love a corporation when you know that their main aim is to take your money? I get a similar feeeling, often in Kensington too, when in this wintry weather practically everybody with money is wearing a moncler puffa jacket (do they still call them puffa jackets?). Retailing at many hundreds of pounds these jackets are mostly the badge of social standing and disposable income. But, my imaginary interrogator tells me, they’re such good quality.  My lip curls in time honoured fashion. I remember when I lived in France and had to endure the well-worn mantra about how impossibly difficult it was to pass the French teaching qualifications, the Capes and the Agreg, and how you had devote yourself body and soul (corps et ame) to study over many years to pass this exam. And yet, are all teachers in France geniuses? Not by a long chalk in my experience of the matter. I think all the hysteria about these exams tells us more about one aspect of French culture and its thrall to administrative authority than it does about the exams. In the same way, Japanese youth and upper middle class aspiration are what lie under my imaginary microscope rather than the money-generating mechanisms that are EMI and Monclair.

peoplearerubbish.com

Sometimes it can happen that you see a video from a few years ago – maybe at somebody’s house – and someone – maybe somebody you don’t like – uses a word or turn of phrase on the film and you know he or she picked that up from you because it was your way of referring to something, and moreover, you still use that word or turn of phrase, and you feel oh I’m going to stop using that word or turn of phrase now. That someone has contaminated that word or turn of phrase, stolen it from you.

Alternatively, sometimes you have a word or turn of phrase and a few years later it’s everywhere in the press or on the telly. Has it slipped through from person to person and ended up being used by a powerful person or powerful organisation and now become common currency, all originating from you? Or are you just a conventional mind and others have thought of that word or turn of phrase, many people, and the mass of tide has ended by making that word into a common one? I mean, there are only so many words or turns of phrase that can be invented. Yes, it’s probably the latter.

peoplearerubbish.com

I used to dislike sprouts. Many people dislike sprouts, especially when they are young. Now I like sprouts. The taste is the same but the taste needs to be interpreted by the brain, which has lots of other information concerning sprouts, like the fact that they are nostalgic to me now because my feelings about them as a child were so strong and, maybe, the fact that I know they are doing me good. The nostalgia thing is what plays with me most, I think. I enjoy getting up in the winter on a  cold and frosty morning when it’s still dark outside. Again, nostalgia. A route back to the mysterious land of the past.

The brain fiddles with you. The same happens with colour and language, I read this week that it is not necessarily that the Ancient Greeks (Homer, the wine-dark sea) did not see the colour blue through their eyes. They had no specific word for it, so the brain placed the colour elsewhere. Brain scans have apparently seen activity in the brain which imply the viewing of a black and white drawing of a banana as to some extent yellow because we know its usually yellow.

The implications of this go far in things like Neuro Linguistic Processing and sports psychology, but have always done in literature. The sprout is a touchstone of our surprising, wayward sensibility. The sprout makes literature possible.

peoplearerubbish.com

Uncle Joe and Auntie Peggy had a three-wheeler car when I was little. To me at the time this was the most glamorous of cars, because it was cute and because it was owned by Joe and Peg. Joe and Peg possessed a kind of Punch and Judy glamour. They went away on foreign holidays to Spain and Yugoslavia and visited Capri where Joe had an in-depth conversation with Gracie Fields. I didn’t know who Gracie Fields was but it was one of the names you heard grown-ups bandying about. They did home movies. They took us to Hyde Wakes once a year, picking us up from my mums and dads thrillingly without warning. They gave us money for ice cream, Joe using the verb ‘wack’ (the only time I have ever heard this before or since) as in ‘Wack this out between you’ as he cascaded a stream of coppers and silver into our expectant palms. There is a photo of them somewhere in their heyday. They are walking smiling hand in hand down some promenade somewhere and you can see the white three-wheeler in the background, like Noddy’s car. I remember my mum saying how silly they were to be holding hands like that at their age. Sometimes they let me sit in the drivers seat and pretend I was driving. In a sense I was destined to love cars. But then it didn’t happened. We didn’t get a family car until I was about fourteen and by then the deep palimpsest of bus routes was sunk within me. I never saw the car need. What happened was that I outgrew the Joe and Peg car moment, and the dad car moment came too late.

peoplearerubbish.com

Buying presents for my olde dad was never easy even when he was a younger dad. Once my sister made him a ‘tool box’ from a shoe box and crepe paper that she had seen on Blue Peter. He had thrown it out by Boxing Day. My mum made him get it out of the bin and parade it in front of my sister again, This time with gratitude. This act was alien to my olde dad even then. Now, forget it. On Boxng Day we were at my other sisters for dinner, and DVDs of the children when they were little were put on. I myself am hardly able to contain my boredom, but olde dad is completely uninhibited: He suddenly acquires a bad back (not even the bad shoulder!) and he has to be ferried home. Suits me. We got back in time for Match of the Day. Olde dad took a yellow card for the lads, as they say. This year I didn’t bother. Got him some chocolates. Everybody else had taken the clothes options already anywy. Longjohns; woolly hats; jumpers galore; gloves; thermal socks. It makes no difference. Two years ago I bought him quite an expensive posh jumper from some fancy shop. I saw it was still in his cupboard unwrapped yesterday. And last year I got him some fur-lined leather gloves. They’ve vanished and he’s back on the old acrylic £2.99 gloves he’s always worn. So there’s no point bothering. You learn to treat the whole business as ritual rather than real life. You repeat the lines laid out for you because new ones won’t be heard anyway, and you worship the old objects once more on the altar of the olde dad. It’s the only way. Bend unto it or be swept away! Resistance is futile. All hail the power of the olde dad ritual!

peoplearerubbish.com