Cold Turkey

What had I done to deserve being at woken at 3.45am this Wednesday morning? Normally there's a reason as this happens fairly frequently when I stay at my girlfriend's place. Had I woken up because her thigh was draped across me? No. Had she commandeered my half of the bed, causing me to wake up before I fall to the floor and fracture a limb? No. I could hear the dog barking downstairs but this was also not what had woken me. It was nicotine withdrawal. I had woken up because my body was missing nicotine.

I had smoked my last cigarette at 10.30am on Sunday. It had been difficult. I'd also had some news on that Sunday evening that meant that I'd chosen a bad time to quit. I would have killed for a fag on Sunday night. But I was strong. This was something else though. I was wide awake at a very unsociable hour, apparently prompted by nothing other than a deficit of something in my bloodstream that I didn't even want there.

First things first. One of the dogs was still barking and had been doing so for a few minutes. None of the kids would sort him out. Funny how they seem to be able to sleep like the dead when it suits them yet are always quick to confront me about the noises they hear emanating from their mother's room when I stay there. I go downstairs to the kitchen. The dog is still barking but I can't hear it properly, it's muffled or distant. I'm still half asleep and it takes me a few seconds to realise that the dog is outside. It's 3.45am and the dog is outside, barking its' little head off. How long had it been there? And had it been barking all this time? The neighbours will surely let us know.

Back upstairs to get back to sleep. I'm in bed. I'm comfy. I'm not too hot or cold. I'm tired. I anticipate drifting off to sleep in no time but this doesn't happen. I seem to be as alert as a particularly nervy meercat nursing a double espresso. I've also woken my girlfriend so now I have guilt to go along with my insomnia. I'm calling it insomnia because that's precisely what it is now. I'm tired but I know already that I'm without any chance of proper sleep again before I have to get up for work.

Why is this? I had some idea that nicotine withdrawal might do this to me. But I had no idea it would also give me super sensitive hearing as well. All of the sounds of the house are ringing in my ears. That slightly sinister tapping I hear in the ceiling. The floorboards that creak on the landing even when no-one is walking on them. The boiler, sending water around the house. I swear I can even hear the breathing of the girls sleeping in the room next to me. I am Batfink and I have super hearing.

Even my own body is loud. My stomach burbles and gurgles. I can actually hear my own pulse. And the more I try to ignore these things the louder they become. I toss and turn, to what end I neither know nor care. I look out of the window. My girlfriend doesn't ever close the curtains so I can see outside. The first light of dawn approaches and with it comes birdsong. My God it's loud. Are they actually singing out there or is this all in my head? Am I going insane? No I'm not, but if it was really as loud as it seems to me then no-one would be sleeping. At least the crows haven't started up yet. They have a call that's as loud and ugly as you imagine a crow's call might be. It makes me want to shoot them. Today, this morning, right now, I wouldn't just pick on the crows. I would exterminate the nation's entire bird population if it meant I could get some FUCKING SLEEP! Let me sleep.
Let me sleep
Let me sleep
Let me sleep
Let me sleep
Let me sleep
Let me sleep. Please. Here it comes. Thanks.

Saint Etienne at Bloomsbury Ballroom

Saint Etienne to celebrate the eighteenth birthday of their debut album, Foxbase Alpha, by playing it live in its entirety? Yes please! Since my copy of that album was on a long-ago lost cassette it's fair to say that I haven't listened to it for over a decade. I've listened to plenty of Saint Etienne's other output but couldn't actually remember a lot of that first album. My loss, I'm an idiot.

The Bloomsbury Ballroom proved an excellent venue, good size and acoustics and with a cool bar in a corridor. Saint Etienne have always cultivated a loyal fanbase and the band were very warmly received as they entered the stage to the sounds of the radio show at the start of the album. Then Only Love Can Break your Heart started and I was in pop heaven. During the next forty minutes the diversity of Foxbase Alpha was made apparent to me in a way I'd never really appreciated. It's pop perfection but it takes many forms: dub, deep house, 60's pop pastiche, ambient blah blah blah. It's all here.

Girl VII and London Belongs To Me are utterly charming. Stoned To Say The Least is cool and dark and funky, like a very chilled Underworld. Nothing Can Stop Us Now is so cute and cuddly you could put in a big pink box, tie it with a red ribbon and give it to a five year old girl as a birthday present. Like A Swallow is epic and beautiful and sounds like the best thing I've ever heard. Then the band walk off for five minutes (they actually said they'd be five minutes! How sweet?) before returning to play some more recent favourites.

Method Of Modern love is their latest single and shows the band have lost absolutely nothing over the years. The quality of their output has never faltered and every song played during the second half was a winner. When I'm old(er) and grey(er) and someone says to me "Old man, I've read that there was something called pop music years ago. What was it like?" I'll just play them Who Do You Think You Are? and all will be clear. And then I might spoil them and play Sylvie as well. Sylvie is genius, like the story from a John Hughes film with an added Hitchcock-ian twist told via the medium of epic euro-pop. It always makes me cry.

The encore includes He's On The Phone, an absolute high point in modern popular music. Pop really has few finer moments to offer than Sarah Cracknell's spoken (not sung or whispered, but spoken. Or maybe cooed) Yes at the start of the chorus. It's a glorious end to a fantastic evening. I leave convinced that there has been no finer purveyor of pop music in modern times than Saint Etienne.

Shitweasels

Starlings - Stop fucking on the lawn outside my flat. Have some decency, yeah? Just because you look as if you've been recently rescued from an oil slick off the coast of Alaska doesn't mean you have to act like dirty bastards, you dirty bastards.

Manchester City FC - I used to have a soft spot for you lot, attendances going up when you got relegated cos you have proper fans, those fans having a sense of humour, for not being United etc. Now you make me sick. What is it with this desire to be owned by some of the world's worst human rights abusers? What next, a managerial dream team consisting of the exhumed corpses of Hitler and Pol Pot? God, I hope Fulham beat you again this weekend. Just don't publicly flog us if we do.

Kids round my way - I know you nicked the badge from the front of my Mazda cos I saw you do it to someone else's car. If I catch you near my car again you'll need to remove another badge. A really big one. From your collective anus.

Kasabian - An excess of guitar fx does not disguise your dearth of ideas, it only accentuates it, you paisley scarf wearing twats. No matter how much you polish and buff it, cover it in make up and spray it with cheap cologne, a turd will always be a turd.

Man, this feels good, I could go on like this all night!

Still Lazy

My God, I'm a lazy shit!

When I first started this blog there was pretty much nothing going on in my life, yet I still found loads to write about. Now that my life is a little bit interesting I write bugger all. Go figure. Maybe the two are connected. Maybe I'm busy living, hence my reluctance to write about living. Maybe, and this is by far the more likely of these two options, I'm just a lazy shit.

Having a girlfriend who has five kids should give me much to write about. And it does. It's just that I'd rather not write it here. It's personal, y'know? I'm not really comfortable writing about other people anyway. They might not like it. And writing about the kids would just be wrong, I feel. Am I being over-sensitive here? Possibly, but this way I can be sure that I'm not offending anyone. That's important. One of the things that characterises my life is that I don't offend people. I just don't do it. Not people I like, anyway.

Here's a couple of things I can write about:

- I took my girlfriend to meet my parents for the first time. She was apprehensive but really seemed to enjoy herself. My parents are lovely people who will go out of their way to make anyone feel welcome.I'm very lucky to have them.

The visit alone is newsworthy enough since I've not introduced a girlfriend to my parents for over fifteen years, but there's also something else about that weekend. My girlfriend hired an Aston Martin DB9 for me. How about that? James Bond's car, all mine for a whole weekend, a car that cost more than the flat I live in! It was wonderful. I'm not gonna go all Jeremy Clarkson here and start talking in ridiculous metaphors, barely disguising the fact that I actually want to have sex with the car (which I don't). I'm just going to say that it was a fantastic experience, a slice of luxury that I would otherwise never have experienced if my lovely lady hadn't done such a lovely thing for me. The other thing?

- We spent last weekend in Iceland, and what an incredible place that is! God was clearly having fun when he created that place! That's the water spurting from the ground and the pols of hot, milky blue water I'm on about there. Not the stunning landscape, that isn't funny, just astonishingly beautiful. There are a few obvious adjectives that I'll be using here and I'd like to get them out of the way now: desolate, savage, barren, you know what I mean. And the nightlife and people of Reykjavik were great. A lovely, lovely place to which I'd be very happy to return.

You see? I'm a lazy shit. I've driven 350 miles in a DB9 and been to Iceland and can barely be bothered to write about it. This is gold, gold I tells ya! It's inspirational stuff yet I'm inspired only to take pictures and talk to my friends about it, not write. Except I am writing about it, aren't I? Ooh, I'm full of contradictions, me. That's something else I could write about. At a later date though. I've done quite enough for one day.

I'm A Lazy Git

Not a great deal of time and effort is required in order to complete a post here on Blogger yet this is my first effort for two months. True, my life is a whirlwind of showbiz parties and high level business meetings, foreign travel and loose women, not to mention a quite debilitating drug habit, but if Lily Allen can manage her blog then I don't see why I shouldn't be able to. There are reasons for my blogging dormancy though. None of them particularly good, but reasons nonetheless.

I may or may not have written before about my need to be a bit unhappy in order to want to write anything or, in fact, do anything creative. Unhappiness begets introspection and introspection begets blog posts. This means that I normally have a whole load of things I'm happy to write about since I'm generally a melancholy soul (melancholy soul, miserable sod - what's the difference?). It creates a little bit of a problem for me though. I had a really good idea for a book a few months ago but if I'm miserable it will come out all maudlin and self-indulgent. Yet if I'm happy I can't be bothered to write. It's a conundrum that may yet deprive the World of a major literary talent. Or, then again, maybe not.

These last couple of months, however, I've been (whisper it).....happy. Yes! Me, happy! And it's because I've fallen in love. My God, I'm a soppy so and so! If someone had told me a few years ago that I would ever write that line in a public forum, even a forum like this that no-one actually reads, I would have said Shut up Mum, you're embarrassing me again! But there it is for all to see, for ever.

It will come as little surprise to anyone who knows me as a perpetual singleton, a bachelor, a man who bears little responsibility towards himself or anyone else, a man whose lifestyle has barely changed since his student days, that I've fallen for a woman who has five children. Funny huh? My friends think it's funny. I suppose it is really when you look at it from afar. It doesn't feel funny to me. It just feels like I have a great time with my girlfriend and a great time with her kids. There's never a dull moment. I love it.

That's all I'm going to write about this right now. There's enough sentimentality in this post already to guarantee I'll cringe terribly if I ever read it in the future so I'll finish here with this simple conclusion: Life is good.

Movember

I’ve occasionally wondered what I’d look like with facial hair, mainly because I’ve never had any. I wouldn’t have to wonder if I’d seen how it looks before, would I? I did go through a short and an ill-advised period of stubble a few years back. I’d been somewhere that had deprived me of the use of a razor for a week and quite liked the result. It made my gaunt face look a bit fuller. The only problem was that the hair on my face barely qualified for the title stubble. Downy fluff would be more accurate. It was too light and too soft. Put it this way, there was no way I was going to be able to ignite a match on it like hard men do in Westerns unless I doused myself in petrol first. And then sat under a magnifying glass in the midday sun. In the Sahara.

This has never been a problem. It would be nice to have the ability to grow stubble but I’m happy without it. Especially since those men who can grow stubble often have to deal with excess hair all over the place. I’m talking primarily about the back and shoulders. I won’t ever need to wax my shoulders and I’m happy about that. The only excess hair I’ll ever have to deal with is ear and nose hair if I ever become an old man and I certainly won’t worry about that. I’ll be too busy writing to the Daily Mail to complain about teenagers and the decline of British society in general to take any care in my appearance. Besides, my old man smell will probably be more of an issue.

A few weeks ago I received an invitation to a Facebook group called Movember, the aim being for members to grow a moustache throughout November and pay £5 to a Prostate Cancer charity whilst doing so. Well, why not? I joined up and waited for my ‘tache to arrive. Then I waited some more. And then some more….

It took a long time but after a couple of weeks it became apparent, to me at least, that I hadn’t just let myself go but was, in fact, growing a ‘tache. It didn’t look good. I looked like the kind of man that mothers might warn their children to stay away from, or those men, often called Kevin, who have left school but hang around the gates in their Vauxhall Novas trying to impress the schoolgirls. The average ten year old Indian boy has facial hair more impressive than mine was at that time. Never mind. Given another week my moustache would surely begin to assume the body and gravitas of, say, Stalin’s effort.

I was wrong. It actually got worse. On a night out with friends I was introduced to someone thus: “This is Ian. He’s doing that for charity”. I started doing this myself, informing anyone that I hadn’t seen for a while that the ‘tache was for a good cause and certainly not for aesthetic purposes. This explanation invariably drew a comment like “Oh, I see!” and an expression which showed that a particularly puzzling issue had just been resolved.

By the end of the month, however, I had become quite attached to my mo. I felt that, having spent a month growing it, it would be a shame to get rid of it, regardless of how silly I looked. I took the rather nonsensical view that I had suffered to get this far and maybe I should keep it. Just for a while.

The day before the end of the month was a Saturday and I spent the evening with a bunch of close friends I’ve known most of my life, none of whom had ever seen me with facial hair. They ridiculed me mercilessly all night. I didn’t mind this. I’m quite used to it. One single episode, though, was quite traumatising. I made a flirtatious comment to a barmaid. She made a flirtatious comment in return. I was just about to continue this brief dalliance when I realised that I was wearing a look that put a good eight years on me. I clammed up completely. The ‘tache had drained me of my confidence. The mo definitely had to go.

I’m now back to my old self. The mo is no more and won’t return. If it ever does then I’ll know that I have finally let myself go for good.

Bob

I don't generally feel the need to answer the door if the doorbell goes. The chances are it will be someone conducting a survey or trying to sell me something. Or, at this time of year, kids doing Halloween stuff. I don't answer the door in the evening in October. And gone are the days when people just wander round to their friend's place and knock on the door like my friends and I did when we were children. Such behaviour now is seen as slightly desperate, even a little bit deviant.

Now I look back on it I find it unusual that I decided to answer the door at 10.45 yesterday morning, a Saturday. I was greeted by a man wearing a three quarter length wool coat and a Fedora who introduced himself as Bob. He looked to be in his mid to late forties and was accompanied by his son, who was smartly dressed in black. I observed these details after I realised that I was being doorstepped by Jehovah's Witnesses. You just know, don't you? They come in all shapes and sizes, and probably colours, but you always know instantly. Except for my Grandmother, who once kept a couple of poor unsuspecting Witnesses in tea and biscuits for a couple of hours whilst they talked to her about Jehovah. I wonder how long it took them to realise they were dealing with an Alzheimer's case and how long they would have remained had the home care not turned up!

When confronted by Jehovah's Witnesses one's instinct is to formulate a plan of escape. For some this comes easy. My dad has a stock response: "The only saving I'm interested in is the saves the Spurs goalie makes on a Saturday!". I believe he thinks it's witty. Others probably have no problem in closing the door in their face. I can't do this. My mum brought me up to show other people more respect than I show myself. So I let them speak and hope that an opportunity for me to end the conversation politely presents itself.

Bob began by asking me whether I was worried about the future of our planet. I replied that I was, or rather that I was concerned for the future of mankind. The planet will always be here whereas we are but dust. Bob liked this. He proceeded to read from the Book of Isaiah, telling me of Isaiah's prophecies. Isaiah got loads of stuff right, apparently, so we should listen when he says that "The earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered". Unless, of course, we turn to God.

Bob kept asking me questions. By now I was quite enjoying our conversation. Bob seemed like a nice guy but, more importantly, he was teaching me about the Bible. I don't care what anyone says, it's an interesting book for more reasons than I have the time and inclination to go into here. I mean to read it but keep getting waylaid by other books and TV and the internet. Anyway, each answer I gave to Bob's questions prompted him to dig out another section of the Bible. It was uncanny. Bob was able to relate everything I said to the Bible. We went back to Genesis and talked about the creation and Adam and Eve. Then he related Adam and Eve's temptation to Christ's death. I found it all very interesting. I knew the stories but had never before had the symbolism explained to me. I was enjoying myself and had completely forgotten that I was supposed to make something up to explain why I had to shoo Bob and his son from my door.

I should contextualise all this - I've been quite depressed lately. It's not related to any particular event or prompted by trauma but rather that I've been questioning just about everything. Nothing seems to make much sense to me right now, especially when I seek to justify my own place on this earth. I fall woefully short of justifying my place. Someone else could do a much better job of being me than I do. I'm in quite a vulnerable place right now.

Also, I've long believed that there is a fundamentalist in me just dying to get out (I should point out that I don't believe Jehovah's Witnesses to be religious fundamentalists. Well, maybe only a little bit). I'd love to just belong to something and have that something give me guidance. I just can't take organised religion seriously due to what I perceive as over-reliance upon a book. I can't do blind faith. It is this that will always prevent me from following a religion. I like science and evidence too much.

So, Bob and I are getting on famously. I'm pleased that someone is teaching me something and Bob pleased that I haven't told him to get lost. But then Bob ruins it. He had to because he's an evangelist. But I'd started losing interest when he began talking talking about the the day of judgement being near. I'm not interested in that. I just wanted to hear Bible stories and have their significance explained to me. I told him that I had to get to the bank before it closed, which was true, and said goodbye after thanking him for an interesting chat and wishing him a good day. By the time I got to shut the door he'd shaken my hand three times and given me his mobile number. I think he was genuinely happy. I hadn't told him where to go and was interested in what he had to say. Not interested enough to become one of the 144000 souls who will be saved on Judgement Day but interested nonetheless.