Pavement poem #2

Second in the mini-series…

In my defence all I can say is that a) this is really a penny I picked off the street (all the objects are/will be, no lying there honest); and b) I’m trying to go for that John Hegley-esque ligthness of touch. And failing miserably, I know I know.

I did these at the back end of last year in a moment of enthusiasm, the white heat of creative conviction and all that, but became disheartened, as ever, once I got to the stage of sending them to potential publications. I think they’d be great as a series in your weekend supplement, you see, a little light relief with your Saturday bacon sandwich. But there just comes a limit to the number of times you can hear people say they liked your stuff but it just isn’t right for their section/space/magazine/whatever before you just give up. In this case it was about nine times.

Pavement Poems #1

A little extra here, instead of a grumbly post: the first of a series I’m doing about stuff I’ve found in the street:

On not being a famous author

I was reading somewhere recently about Simon Winchester’s account of his typical writing day. It sounded idyllic. He has a farmhouse up in the hills of Massachusetts, and a barn converted into his library/study/scriptorium. Each morning he enters the barn before dawn, spends two hours reviewing the previous day’s work, then prints it out before breakfast. Then he works from 9am till 3pm writing new material, his word counter in the top left corner counting down the target: 100,000 words in a hundred days. That’s focus.

It made me envious beyond measure, made me hate myself for not being better at this stuff, for not being Simon Winchester. There’s a purity in that kind of routine. Whereas I waste my early morning writing in blogs, or in my ‘morning pages’, which are just private drivel and won’t amount to anything. They’re therapeutic, you see. Though maybe my best therapy would be to aim to write 100,000 words in a hundred days.

Instead, what does my day consist of? Lots of coffee, and reading the paper, and desultory emails here and there, chasing ideas that have been sent out and have no response yet… then a response comes in, a rejection obviously, and much nervous energy and time gets wasted in dealing with that. It’s a day of faffing, without focus, without drive.

Why I Hate the Blogosphere

I think the blogosphere is a lonely, horrible old place. It’s one of the many dreadful legacies of the internet – along with YouTube, Facebook and all the other sites that make us ordinary people think for some reason our banal lives might possibly be of interest to other people.

So why have I started to do it? you ask, very reasonably. Partly because of peer pressure, I suppose. My peers being, well, all the other freelancers who I can see out there on the blogosphere, who have hundreds of friends on their bulging Facebook accounts, and into whose laps, consequently, work must obviously fall like confetti at a wedding party.

Is that very low-down and cynical of me? Should I be blogging for a higher reason? I think anyone who claims to have a higher purpose in this game is either fibbing or kidding themselves or both. We are told this is the way to go – and slowly the hype builds so much that not to go this way seems perverse. Not that I have a problem with perverse, but there comes a point when you have to go with the flow.

It’s another of the awful consequences of the internet: the information age is a bullying task master. Eventually people like me feel compelled to offer up our thoughts - words that would in previous days have been scribbled in thick notebooks kept under the bed, or typed in password-locked documents, or generally hoarded, stored or secreted - for the general consumption of no one in particular but ourselves.

But this open, free-for-all soul-searching – who does this benefit? Not the blogger, who feels inhibited and cannot write what he or she really wants to write. The blogger wants readers, so has to blog in a certain way, apparently, to gain readership. They have to talk up the right issues, in the right number of words. They have to visit lots and lots of other blogging sites, and leave messages, and links, and trackbacks or whatever. And they do, obviously – for those ones who follow the rules it seems they become taken over by the desire to be ‘top of the blogging polls’, the #1 blog. That’s only natural. I am not proud of being 4,219,435th today. Top ten would be good for the ego I agree.

But then the process takes over – that’s what I hate. Still, in my case that hasn’t happened, obviously, as I only have about 6 hits. Hurray! I can keep my sense of integrity. I’ve had one comment, but as that was from a mad right-winger in America I won’t count her. And I only have one friend on my Facebook account – and he’s fictional, someone I made up…

Hey ho. Enough already. I apologise for not blogging correctly, and for languishing so far down the tables, and for slagging it all off in a post instead of writing about something people would want to read. Sorry. Slagging off blogging is bad blogiquette, I can see that. After only a week or so at this game, I await my banishment from the blogosphere with something approaching relief.

President Obama

It feels weird to write those words. I am so pleased. For us in the UK it meant staying up all night, but I think it was worth it. I say ‘think’ because my head is swimming now and I have to face the day without sleep. But I’m glad I stayed awake to see, first, Obama clear the magic 270 college votes line (4am GMT), then the surprisingly eloquent and generous concession speech from McCain (4.30am), and then the President Elect addressing hundreds of thousands in Chicago. His oratory, strength, sheer cool and feline grace are familiar now, but that doesn’t diminish them.

Can one man stop the world going to hell in a handcart…?

What’s the point of it all?

Harumph: Gloomyman today, rather than Grumblyman, perhaps. Apologies. Having one of those ’specks in the universe’ moments. Maybe it’s inevitable when big things in the world take hold of your imagination – will Obama clinch it today, or will they get to him first? How much suffering can the people of Congo take? Will Kate Moss get a new haircut soon? – that you wonder where you fit into all this.

I fear I’ve lost, or missed - or never heard – my calling. You look at the news this week, and two men stand out as having heard and heeded their calling: Barack Obama and Lewis Hamilton. Both proving that with skill, grit, determination, bloody mindedness, luck, support, charisma, good looks and huge amounts of money you can get wherever you want to be against all the odds. (Sorry, that was a bit unfair about the money. I realise the huge amounts of dosh came to them both at the later stages, after all the other elements had generated success.)

And where do I want to be? I am so cynical about this celebrity- and fame-obsessed culture of ours, and yet a lot of the time I find myself pandaring to it in my attempts as a freelance to generate work. I send out ideas that get rejected for not being frothy enough, so I froth them up and they still get rejected. Once in a blue moon something gets accepted and then I feel, not a huge sense of satisfaction but a kind of emptiness that I have become a part of the froth that I despise.

It all feels so insignificant. I can see why people go join charities in Africa, or become war photographers. Then at least you would feel like you were doing something significant.

Then pile on top of the insignificance the fact that there is not enough frothy work even to support us where we live for longer than maybe a month or two – and there is Christmas coming – and you can see that the doom and gloom come piling in.

So what do I do in response? I blog. Fantastic. And then I look at the fact my blog is 4,392,302nd in the Technorati listings and I think: what the hell’s the point of it all?

US Election excitement

Is it very naff of me to be getting just a teensy bit excited over tomorrow’s election? Like all people rooting for Obama, that excitement is tempered with anxiety – what dirty tricks will the Republicans pull in the last 24 hours? What shenanigans will go on at the polling booths? W’s illegal victory in 2000 showed how the American Presidency can be cheated with ease and complacency. But this time it feels different. This time it’s not such a close call. And McCain doesn’t have a brother who’s Governor of a swing state…

So I remain just a bit excited. It reminds me, in a small way, of 1997 – that desperate sense of hope in the last hours, that conviction the Tories would pull it back, legally or illegally – that they would not let power slip from their grasp. That ‘daring to believe’ feeling.

Then it all went pear-shaped, of course. But that was because we were electing Tony Blair.

There are those who would draw parallels between Blair and Obama. They would go on to say that the newly elected Democratic President will suffer the same fate as Blair - he will become embroiled in the political machinery of government, find himself swimming in treacle as he tries to implement a watered-down radical-lite agenda, and that his administration will soon unravel as the people’s hopes and expectations fail consistently to be met.

Perhaps. But remember how different the situations are. Blair was no Obama. Blair was a figure from the Establishment, a square peg in Old Labour’s round hole until he got his Clause 4 woodwork kit and reshaped the hole to fit him. I don’t believe Blair was ever truly radical. I think his heart was in the right place most of the time, but he was too like the old guard. He had to be – the thinking being that the British would never elect anyone remotely ‘different’.

You don’t need a degree in psephology to see that Obama is ‘different’. For the Democratic Party, Hillary would have been the safe option – she may have been a woman, but she was of the Clinton dynasty, she was part of the American establishment’s elite. Obama is an outsider – his race, his background, even his inexperience (that supposed Achilles heel of his) all mark him out as an outsider. Whatever the outcome of his days in office, whether he meets or confounds expectations, the mere fact of his being in office for true idealism – something I thought our modern world was bereft of.

So I’ll keep my fingers crossed, even if an Obama victory means we Brits can no longer feel superior to the Americans…

Halloween blues

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bang on about how awful it is we ‘celebrate’ a pagan festival, nor how dreadful that we have imported the Trick-or-Treat sensibility and have thus capitulated once more to American cultural imperialism. No, you’re safe from those rants here. Take those rants as read, naturally, given that the world is going to hell in a handcart.

No, my problem with this particular Halloween is that we have no children here. Being what the Americans (again, sorry) would call a ‘blended’ family, meaning we’ve brought children from past relationships into an new relationship not that we have gone all Stephen King with the food processor, we are at that weird but regular point where all our kids are with their other parents.

‘Normal’ families reading this will now think one of two thoughts: either ‘poor beggars’ or ‘lucky buggers’. It’s true that regular time to ourselves with no children around does help make for a healthy and strong relationship, once you get over all the guilt and anxiety and transitional distress at the kids’ not being here. But on days like this one, which are so focused on children, what happens is you get the guilt and anxiety and transitional distress magnified and rammed down your throat every which way you turn.

It’s going to be nearly as bad as last Christmas, when we didn’t have any children on Xmas Day. That was really fun. After a day straining not to think about it we eventually descended into a blazing row that lasted all evening. Sorry, ‘row’ is the wrong word. I’m told we don’t have rows, we have ‘discussions’. Well, that discussion went on and on and involved lots of shouting and a few objects finding new trajectories through the air.

So today – this evening – will have to be an evening of distractions – a film, a meal out, anything that means we are not in the house when the trick-or-treaters come calling. Hopefully that won’t mean the little tykes will ram-raid the house in our absence. Perhaps we can conjure a big enough air of melancholy around our front door to deter them from knocking in the first place.

Brand, Ross and the Daily Mail witch-hunt

I cannot believe the BBC have been so foolish as to sleepwalk into that beartrap set by the Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday. I’m no fan of Jonathan Ross, finding his suits not big enough to contain his ego and his ego even less appealing than his suits, and like many I’m amazed the Beeb thought him worth 18 million quid, but if there’s one thing I like less than Ross it’s a Daily Mail witch-hunt. As for Russell Brand: maybe his career will be better for getting away from the straitjacket of the Beeb; maybe he can get that edge back from his earlier work. But he shouldn’t have walked.

At times like this The Mail reminds me of Mr Burns in the Simpsons: ‘release the hounds’, it purrs, and the bloodthirsty hacks stream from the mansion on the scent of some poor schmuck who has dared to awaken their owner’s disdain. ‘Twas ever thus. However, Brand was probably foolish to start chuntering on in his show about the Mail’s past, and its fondness for Hitler in the 30s… In fact it was probably that broadcast that led to them releasing the hounds in the first place.

But what’s the alternative? We all keep quiet and only say what the Daily Mail wants us to say? I’m truly sick of the bullying, hectoring role played in British society by Associated Press. It has an influence far beyond its worth. The Establishment should stand up to it, but no: instead we have this Prime Minister following Blair’s lead of kowtowing to everything the Mail or Evening Standard suggests.

For my whole life I’ve witnessed this sorry spectacle. I grew up in the 80s: it wasn’t the Sun wot won it for Thatcher all those times, it was the Mail. How? Because it consistently put the fear of God into the middle classes about the dire outcome of a Labour government. It made a fool of Kinnock, painted Glenys as a Welsh Lady Macbeth and the rest of Labour as Commies-in-waiting. You could even argue that without the Mail there would have been no Clause 4, no New Labour, no Tony Blair…

But enough of the past. I have a solution for the future. Now that the Government has shown it has a taste once more for nationalisation, in the form of £50bn bailouts to shoddily-run banks, all it needs to do is buy a majority stake in Associated Press, set it up as an arms-length company, and then sit back and relax. They could even install Brand and Ross as editors-in-chief.

A CV for the shopfloor

The fact I am writing this at 9am instead of stepping out onto the shopfloor to advise customers on sock purchases is proof I suppose that so far the day job has not materialised. My partner doesn’t believe I am serious in my intentions. She may be right. Having finally chosen the shop that I would not mind spending my days folding clothes in, I was foiled – not by the 18 year old talking to me like her grandpa, but by her smiling request that I hand over my CV.

Ah. CV. You mean you need one even to work in a shop? It’s a brave new world out there.

When I get home I look at the fragments of documents that might one day constitute a CV. It’s a mess. I stitch some of it together and it goes on for pages and pages. My partner laughs over my shoulder. She doesn’t seem to think the Paul Smith shop in the Designer Outlet would be all that bothered that I wrote about modernism, Lubetkin and south east London in the Guardian in 2003. She may have a point.

Depressed by that, I ditch the CV writing. Then events take over, in the shape of half term holidays, sucking me in and spitting me out here on the other side – all our children being now with their other parents for a few days. (That’s another story – I’ll come to it by and by.) So by rights I should get back to that CV today, and take it into the Paul Smith shop. Who knows, I might end up folding socks in there after all? That would be a shocker.