Breakfast Club

In McDonald's, Hammersmith, at seven in the morning, I found myself in a fight with three men. I hadn't planned to be there, but then again, I hadn't scheduled to avoid it, so perhaps the blame lay with me. It was a pathetic, surreal affair, as unstaged fights often are; no flair, no precision, not a patch on the fictionalised fisticuffs beamed into our screens every day. There was no pounding rock soundtrack, no satisfying thunks or smacks, blows reduced to little more than hugging, punches landing like drunk ducks on a frozen lake, how very disappointing. It was an odd match up too, in the red corner was a guy with a 2Pac-4eva tattoo on his right bicep, contrasting nicely with his eyes that had been accentuated with a delicate eye line. It was kind of a HomeBoyGeorge look and I can't say it was working for him. He'd just ordered his food and was carrying it over to a table when this dishevelled bum walked in, scabby and peeling of skin, shouting ‘you wanna do this then?’. Well, GlitterGhettoBoy obviously did want to do whatever this bum wanted to do, as he dropped his tray, squared off and pulled out a chain, whirling it round his head as he advanced. Weapons! we, the onlookers, thought, Now we're getting somewhere! Sadly, his chain wasn't very thick, so although it sounded mighty impressive as he slashed and whipped it through the air, the other guy brushed it off like a tickle. They came together like two bears covered in honey, and us breakfasters sat back, munching our mcmuffins, and watched five minutes of primetime hugs, tickles and occasional biting. I had my money on NotQuiteSixPac, but Scabby made a glorious lunge and floored him just as the police arrived, and I lost my hash brown to a guy next to me.

On the line

After watching 'Where Eagles Dare' one time too many, I realise that before I die, I would like to have a least one conversation in my life in which I get to have the following exchanges:

'Allow me to introduce myself,'

'I'd advise you not to Colonel...'

'You can't prove any of this!'

'Can't I?'

and...

> you are beautiful

+ it is true

> it is true that you are beautiful
+ it is beautiful that you are true

> kissing you is an option i’d like to consider
+ kissing you is a possibility i’d like to explore

at some point all of this happened
at some point none of it did
at some point that ceased to matter

Juicy

On the back of my exotic fruit drink is a note that reads 'if this product is not entirely satisfactory please call 0800 yada whatnot'. Now entirely satisfactory? Entirely? I mean, c'mon, it's drinkable, it's not making me gag here, I'm keeping it down, but am I entirely satisfied? Well... I think that comes down to your definition of exotic. That there is a rather airy fairy adjective of a word, there's a lot of leverage there, a whole room of maneuver. For example, to those who go for nothing but margherita on their pizza, and ask for scampi at the curry house, exotic could mean a bit of Worcester sauce on their cheese on toast. Whereas the star-keeper at the Michelin committee probably has a rather more select palette, a palette that might be considerably offended by this dilution of concentrated second-rate rotting fruit pulp. On a personal level, I would have to say for 89 pence this carton sates my immediate needs, much like a McDonald's quells my late-night hunger pangs, but still I find myself yearning for that extra £1.76 to spend, so I could splash out on a top-of-the-range luxury beverage, Tropicana for example. If I had that sort of money, then I'm sure satisfaction in its entirety would be available to me.

Westminster

I went to pray but God was out
He'd left the church in hands devout
In seats of saints I sat and wept
And sinned in thought as in God crept

Antique Wisdom

Nothing is more sacred than second-hand knowledge, all other forms pale in comparison, it is kryptonite to wisdom, heels to Achilles. And it is irrelevant the qualifications of those against whom you wield it. They could have designed, built, wept over and destroyed whatever matter is at hand, if you have insider knowledge from an overheard conversation on the bus, you've won that one. Where'd you hear that, they'll ask. On the bus!! you'll respond. The bus?! Oh no! Oh Woe! they'll cry, We deflate! We defer! Bus knowledge trumps all.

(untitled post)

What does it say about us as a society that as we feign opulence for the masses, the majority are slaving away at dead-end jobs trying to achieve the illusion of it. We've sold our souls in exchange for luxury bags and two aisles of cereal, and daily we exploit whoever's nearest all in a bid to keep the cycle going. We have a no-cost workforce, drones buzzing about completing menial tasks, all of whom are fed with the anesthesia of a scare-mongering media. There are many ways to remove all dignity from a person in return for the minimum wage, but I can't think of many more degrading than employment as a one of those sign-holder guys. Standing on street corners with a placard nailed to a stick? It's not even a real billboard, it's just bill, and he's bored! Whether it's for a sandwich shop or a golf sale, you're a lamp post without the longevity. Nothing really says you've hit rock bottom more clearly than having a career where you can be replaced by a stick, only, the thing is, it's not cost-effective. That's right, the value of a human life is nothing in comparison to the price of secured advertising space these days.

john has left the building

.

..

...

As soon as I open the screen my head goes blank. The light goes on and thoughts flee like bats from a cave. They flap and scatter leaving me with nothing but white noise and an itchy feeling in the back of my head. I try to put something together, but all that comes out is                         nothing                       ...                just nothing.

Worrying. isn't it?

Sleeper Hit

It's almost midnight, I'm in Edinburgh and I have to be home for tomorrow. So that's no good is it? I walk to the station and catch an 'all you can sleep' express that gets in at 7am. Perfect. In the carraige the light is a dirty yellow, the air muted and heavy, whispered voices hush each other. I find my seat next to two girls who avoid all eye contact with me. We haven’t even started yet and I’m exhausted. The people around me, those lucky enough to sleep, travel in close comatose, a journey dissolved into nothingness, the rest of us just gaze out of the window at things we can't see. A train scatters its light through the window as it shoots past, clattering. I catch one of the girls staring at my screen. Get your own personality I think and shade my screen. Boring even myself, I go to the bar and get a two beers and a whisky, I split the cans with a girl in the bar coach and we sit there drinking, not saying much. By the time I get back to my seat those two girls have fallen asleep with their mouths open, one of them snoring in my ear. It’s not pretty. I don't manage to sleep that night, in case you're wondering. I spend seven hours in my own company, getting slowly drunk. By the time I arrive in the big smoke my tongue is furrier than my headrest and my body feels like it's been dragged through a cat backwards. Not those around me though. Chipper is the only word to describe them, it's like a scene from the Walton's, all 'good morning Jimmy!'s and 'how did you sleep?'s. I snarl at them to get out the way; the city is no place for pleasantries.

Death of the Postcard

Dear Mr Postcard
I am no longer talking to you
You pretend I can write on you
But as soon as I start to, you
Run me out of space
And all I’ve said is hi
The rest I wrote is waste
Meaningless meaningless
Like 'Today I ate my sandwich toasted'
Which can never be unwritten
Merely posted

In Thin Air

I imagine her disappearing, I'm not sure why, but I do. One day when we are out, I'll turn my back, in a bookshop maybe, I'll get a little too engrossed in something I pick off the shelf perhaps, I'll turn too many pages before remembering where I am and when I do she will no longer be there. I'll walk down each aisle, look behind every shelf, imagining that she is doing the same for me and this is what keeps us from finding each other, that if one of us just stood still for a moment then the other would come round the corner, but neither of us will because we are scared the other is. I keep looking, she has evaporated but I keep looking. I call her phone and she doesn't answer, I call her phone and she doesn't answer, I call her phone but it's switched off. I have a strange feeling in my stomach, a crunched nervousness. I should stay where I am, I think to myself, she's just gone off for a moment and she'll be back, just to the toilet, or to pay for that photography book she was looking at. She has left me, I tell myself, I have to find her. I think I should stay right where I am, she's just gone off to ask one of the assistants a question, and she'll come back just as soon as he points the way to the biographies, or art history. She has left me, I tell myself, and I have to find her. But it is too late because she has left me.

We are lying in bed one night when she turns to me. 'I've got a feeling you're going to leave me, you'll disappear, I won't know anything about it. One minute you'll be with me, beside me, standing beside me, the next you'll be gone. Maybe I'll be looking in a bookshop, and I'll find a book, and I'll start reading and when I turn around you'll be gone.'

'I am not going to leave you.' I say, but one of us is, and soon. We both know, we are kidding ourselves, pretending that we don't, but we do. Each day our departure date creeps closer, each minute is one less that we have to spend together. We don't know what the event will be, a car accident, a mugging and misunderstanding, a gas leak and a sparking match, but it will be soon. Our bodies are preparing themselves for the loss, no one knows who it's going to be, perhaps both of us, but certainly one of us. I look at her eyes as they flicker across my face for signs or hints. But she is looking in the wrong place, our angel is hovering in the room, above us, around us, it seeps into our minds and sends premonitions of the separation waiting to occur.

Parting Gifts

Before he left he gave me five boxes. Then he left. Five boxes; one for each sense. He was a shit like that. Before I left, I opened them. He bought me perfume, he hated the one I wore, he wanted me to smell like he imagined. I never smelt like he imagined, but he imagined I did. For taste he bought me an interior design catalogue because he said I had none. Arrogance was one of his better qualities. He gave me a photo of himself so I could remember what he looked like. Every time we were apart I forgot. I confused him with someone else I used to know. He didn’t like that. He carried a photo of me, even though it looked nothing like I did. It was much prettier than I really was, even then. He was so proud of that picture, taken from that strange angle in that strange light, he showed it to his friends and they patted him on the back and bought him drinks. I don’t look like that! I never did, not even once! In the fourth box was a telephone number, to call in case I wanted to hear him, to listen to his breath at the end of the receiver, separated by static and distorted into ones and zeros. I set fire to that number, even though I knew it off by heart, I set fire to it, and listened as it sputtered and crackled. That sound was more satisfying than a thousand hours of our long gone late-night whispers. Finally he gave me a bar mat. I looked at it. I flipped it over in my fingers, played with it, and failed to remember. When it came back to me it came slowly, like a lizard crawling up my chest. It was the bar mat my fingers rested on the first time our hands met, the first time his warm skin met mine. I felt dizzy, and a little bit sick. And at that moment I wished I wasn’t there.

Water Sports

I have been told to swim. Apparently it’s good exercise and good exercise what I need right now. Whatever. I swim, I choose a pool, I jump in at the deep end. Now when I was younger I used to have the whole aquatic lifestyle going on, I had the trunks, the goggles, the 200m badge, the chlorine-soaked pyjamas, I was an otter in speedo's. No problem. But it's not then, it's now, so problem, and now, as I jump in and start splashing, the water rises, rises around my eyes, fills my ears, covers my head. It appears I no longer have the gift of buoyancy. Ok don't panic, I think, human beings are natural floaters, just relax, lie back and you’ll stay above water. I relax, lie back, and sink like a stone. I cough water out of my nose, blink chlorine from my eyes and rethink. Commitment is what this needs, I need to break out a few of those strokes that brought me the glory of the '87 200's. First I go for breaststroke, but that seems an awful lot of effort to put in for the return, I switch to front crawl and swallow a lung full of water with each breath rather than the intended oxygen, I backstroke but lose my direction and end up plowing through a group of mothers and babies, lastly I resort to doggy paddle, executed so poorly puppies everywhere are renouncing the stroke and turning to butterfly. I've had enough. An eight year old kid floats by and I jump on, dragging him down with me. He struggles but I hold on tight. Get off! he cries, you’ll kill us both! Shut up and get us to shore, I tell him, imagine you’re Lassie! He whirls his arm in a flurry of action, spraying water all over, but slowly, like a very small pink paddle-steamer he turns us and we head in the right direction. At that moment I notice a girl standing next to us, looking at me like an idiot. Ah. I'd forgotten that in the 15 years that have passed since I last did this I've grown and can now stand up in the deep end. What a moment.

Not the Best Quality

I’m an all-rounder guy, a mix of the good and the bad, weigh me up I balance out. Almost. I'm not quite there yet, I have one serious flaw: too many good qualities. Now wait! I'm not saying I'm a saint, c'mon, there is much amiss in me, many, many sore points, if I'm honest they probably far outweigh the good, but that's the problem you see, one too many good points: Honesty. My downfall in a nutshell. You see without honesty I could paper over all the cracks, I could pretend they didn’t exist, I could be just like everyone else. But I don’t. I am open about my grey areas, vocal about my failings, pretenseless about my pretensions, and as a result people have concerns. Still, as they say, with friends like these, who needs enemas?

Last Words

When she spoke people hung on her every word. Literally. Twelve were dead by the time she had introduced herself, another twenty four dropped during an anecdote about a bath she took that morning. It was never the content, on the contrary, each of her stories carried the arc of a soaring bird, and, had they been written down, contained enough rose-tinted, sugar-coated innocence and optimism to taint even the hardest of cynical hearts. Sadly they never were. Rather, she spoke them aloud and thus the timbre and timing of those sonorous tones conspired against her, drawing her downfall. It was in the specific pitch of that velvet voice her fate lay, neither languid nor lackadaisical, deadpan nor downbeat, it was more like a tuning fork of melancholy, that once tapped made the listener hum, softly at first, but then more and more, growing with such intensity than it soon became unbearable for the poor in earshot. Driven, at any cost, to cease those resonations set in motion by that siren, those oscillations which opened a path, a view, that gave at once a glimpse of the eternal and a knowledge of the emptiness, one by one they would escape, they would end it all to stop the small, they would queue, cap in hand, for the silence of silence. Finally there were none left. No one left to listen. Just her, alone, in a small empty room with small empty chairs. In the attic she found a dusted tape recorder, she brought it down and sat in the front room, the last of the sunlight slipping through the window. She clicked it on and sang. Dans la nuit froide
de l'oubli, tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié la chanson que tu me chantais. The tape whirred as it sped back, she adjusted the volume, lay down and set it in motion. A small warm feeling grew gently in her stomach, a tingle spreading through her abdomen, her rib cage, her torso and outwards, and as the white light swallowed her whole, she clicked her heavy tongue in little more than acceptance, the dead now muted.

The Grapes of Wrath

What is a raisin other than a grape with a free bus pass? They are the senior citizens of the fruit world, with bills to pay but no pension or savings, forced out of retirement to play one last gig. As a boy, I didn't believe those who told me grapes and raisins were one and the same, in fact, I openly mocked them. I often held a grape and raisin side by side and lectured on the subtle differences and natural habitats (grapes: hospitals, raisins: muesli). I was a lonely child. But it appears I was wrong, somehow, somewhere, by the most incredible magic, there exist wizards using their powers for nothing more than transforming a lush, plump, juicy, succulent grape, into a shrivelled, dried up, rabbit-dropping of a snack. Nothing makes sense anymore.