Keep On Moving

I’ve moved house again, and I consider this relocation a more positive one; instead of just shuffling between my parents’ respective houses when they got sick of me, I’ve moved in with members of my peer group. Friends, at least for now.

I have a somewhat bipolar view on moving house, although this refers solely to the actual act of moving all the crap you’ve accumulated from one location to another. It’s the shifting of domiciles that gets me all flustered, rather than generally changing location. There are obvious benefits of moving to London (there’s a Caribbean/bagel shop round the corner. That’s the best kind of slash, even better than Buffy/Willow).

Moving house can be a rich and fulfilling experience. It’s an opportunity to imprint a facet of your personality on to a physical space: changing the way a room looks to better reflect your own tastes. One hopes that moving home is a chance to upgrade, to make a fresh start in better surroundings. In these times of financial uncertainty many people may unfortunately find themselves downsizing, moving to poorer accommodation in an attempt to save cash. This is depressing, but even in this case moving home means you can start afresh.

When you move house, you are essentially creating order from chaos. Some of the order you bring with you from your own place: your furniture and your pictures and your telly. Some of it is discretely tucked away in your new house: that cupboard with an unexpected amount of space, that strange little nook in the kitchen that turns out to be the perfect size for the wine rack. This bit I like. The way all that clutter fits neatly in the aforementioned cupboard. The way all your wine bottles look in the aforementioned rack. The way the aforementioned wine gets you pleasantly shitfaced.

The problem is that there is just so much tuppin’ chaos about. And your efforts to unravel complexity and strife only create more. It occurs that I haven’t just lazily listed things for a while, so suck it up:


Things you didn’t plan for on your cheerful ‘New House’ list:

1. It’s filthy. The previous owners or the landlord will have spruced it up a bit, and this will serve to hide the grime until just after it is practical to clean it properly yourself i.e. as soon as your stuff is piled up in the middle of the floor. The obvious bits will be sparkling: oven door, the middle of the carpets, mantelpieces. But anything above eye height and anything below ankle level is going to be mucky and probably with an oddly unplaceable but distinctively unpleasant smell.

Sometimes the house will have been ‘professionally cleaned’ before your arrival. This brings to mind an adept and well practised grime-fighting team, sort of Kim and Aggie with uniforms and without the inherent bigotry. What you probably got is a collection of bored students, or a group of harassed first generation immigrants, rushing to their eighteenth job of the day to earn enough cash to keep little Yaakov in short trousers. You aren’t going to be cheerfully eating off the floor after their lacklustre performance. On the other hand, it might assuage some of the guilt you feel for leaving your old place in such a fucking state.

2. None of your stuff fits anywhere. It doesn’t matter how spartan you were when you moved, or how zen you felt when you took all your old tat to the charity shop. It doesn’t even matter that the space you’re moving in to is technically larger than the one you left. Everything you own is going to spend several days waiting morosely in the middle of the floor. You will fall over it. Several times. Unpacking is not simply a case of transferring your things from suitcase to drawer. Instead it has become, somehow, a three-dimensional jigsaw of hellish complexity and stress, like playing Tetris while ramped up on coke. The only way to ensure you will have a place to store all your shoes is to abandon them all and arrive barefoot.


3. It will take at least twice as long as you anticipated. ‘Oh, we’ll try and get the majority done over the weekend,’ you glibly inform your mother on the phone. Yes, you will try. And, young Jedi, you will fail. Miserably. By Sunday night you will still be craning your neck to see the TV around the boxes marked ‘Kitchen: Misc.’ And on Monday you will go back to work, and on Monday evening you will come back exhausted and look at the box and go: ‘No. Shan’t. You can’t make me.’ You finish moving in roughly three weeks before it’s time to move out.

4. No service providers care you’ve moved. Not a jot. One would think, seeing as it’s all your money in the bank, that said bank might be more forthcoming in updating their details. They won’t: they’re a bank. Instead they’ll fail to update your address at all the first time you tell them, then when you realise you haven’t had a statement in months they’ll change it incorrectly, so your neighbour gets a juicy opportunity to impersonate you on Amazon. And when you finally stagger to the bank and shout at someone they will obsequiously listen to you rant and agree that mistakes have been made and then demurely tap away the changes on their computer. And then the cash machine will eat your card on the way home so you’ll know not to fuck with them next time.


5. Utilities companies don’t want you to move. In fact, they will actively deny that you have done so, in order to keep charging you for the electricity the new tenant is using. Like lovers refusing to acknowledge the end of an affair, they will continue to write and call long after it has become appropriate. When it has become indisputable that you have truly gone for good, they will seek you out at the next property, to make sure that £2.13 you owe does not go unreturned, and possibly post their masturbatory tissues through your letterbox.


6. No one is going to forward you your post. Look at what you did with the old mail from your new house. You collected it up, like an organised and industrious person, then you left it in a prominent place on the table by the door, and when the pile got too big and you couldn’t stand you look at it any more, you sneakily recycled it all.


7. Sky aren’t coming. I’m sorry, they just aren’t. When you think about the service you are getting from them, it’s almost mind-boggling. Information is being coded into a digital signal: intangible, invisible, and amazingly fast; and is being fired up into space and then back down to your television. Imagine how impossible that would have sounded a hundred years ago. And the price you pay for this fantastic, incredible technology is to use up two day’s worth of holiday, and then have to chuck a sickie next week, and finally get it installed three weeks after you were supposed to, and after the technician has drilled several dozen holes in every wall of your house. And you’ll be bored to tears all day while you wait because, obviously, you don’t have Sky, and all your books are still in a box marked ‘Bedroom: Misc’ that you just can’t face opening.

8. You haven’t got the internet. Best get a TV licence. Oh, how do I do that without the internet? Is there a number to call? Actually, wait, the phone doesn’t work. Better set that up first. Um... wait, how do I do that without the internet? Oh you know what, fuck it, let’s just get a takeaway and sort it tomorrow. Right, where’s the nearest Chinese? Just Google... oh for shitting shit’s sake.

9. IKEA hates you. You would think, being a Swedish brand, that IKEA would be fairly liberal, and it certainly pretends to be. ‘Look, much if our furniture is customisable! And we sell Swedish food in the cafeteria! And the instructions are all pictorial, like Lego. Isn’t that so crazy and Scandinavian?’ In fact, IKEA operates much like a Fascist state: everything works fine as long as no one deviates from the set ideal.

‘You vill valk vhere ve tell you to valk! If you deviate from the display path you will end up back vhere you started, or unable to return to the section you need, as punishment for your transgression of zhese simple rules! Ve do not care if you only came to buy vun of zhose tissue paper lamp shades. You vill purchase ALL ze items from a display room, and you vill install ze furniture exactly as ve describe! If you do not, none of it will fit, or it vill look shit! All of our bookcases are unreasonable short, or too tall for ze average room! Zis is to remind you that you are simply a cog in ze IKEA paradise machine. Now nest, you worthless filth. And buy meatballs at ze end. From a can.’


10. That doesn’t work. That thing there, whatever it is. If it worked, they would have taken it with them when they left. If it seems to work, it just means that it’s broken in a way that isn’t immediately apparent, and will only become obvious when you’ve left it alone for a while. It leaks water. Or gas. Or it makes the room smell like burning. Or it might explode. Just leave it.

11. Sometimes making your possessions fit will require a tiny amount of DIY. DIY tasks so small and menial that you cannot in good conscience leave out the Y part. Drill one hole in wall, put in one rawlplug, put in one screw, hang mirror. You cannot justify getting a workman out for that. Even though you know, you KNOW, that you will drill one wonky hole in wall, stuff in incorrect rawlplug, be unable to get it out or get the screw in, dig the whole thing out with pliers and make a horrendous mess, and then in three months time when you’ve gotten over the experience the mirror and possibly the wall will fall over.

12. Every single lightbulb in the house will blow within the first week. Those filaments have been waiting, taut, stretched, aching, aching for release. Click, twang.

Artificial light is over-rated anyway. It gives you cancer, probably. Just put the wine rack somewhere you can still see it, and pray the light in the fridge holds out.

I might not be out of action that long, as I’ll try and sort some automatic updates until I finally get an internet connection (in three weeks). Till then, I’ve got moving chores to get on with (mostly playing Batman: Arkham City. I’m still basically unemployed).

Stay tuned for Verbal Slapstick: Fully Automated.

Well DUH. (A toast-related semi-epiphany)

The other day I had... well, I suppose that epiphany is too strong a word, considering what it actually involved. I'll just tell the story, but I'd ask you to refrain from judging me until I get to the point.

I was making cheese on toast, and I was toasting the bread in the toaster before putting it under the grill (seriously, what's going on with people that don't do that? I asked for cheese on toast, not cheese on bread). The toast popped up and I saw that, as always, there was a narrow strip at the top of the slice that hadn't properly toasted: a white avenue of imperfection on my road to cheese paradise. I bemoaned this fact to my father, and asked aloud why they don't make toasters deep enough to fit the whole slice of bread in.

My father gave me a look that I have come to recognise from my friends and family. It is a complicated expression, driven by mixed emotions. It contains genuine surprise, a soupçon of mirth, a ripple of pained symnpathy for my enduring idiocy and, perhaps, a tiny element of pride: not really in me, but in the fact that they themselves are responsible for my cheerful existence despite my own obvious shortcomings.

"Why don't you," he said, "just put the bread in sideways?"

I think that I stared a moment in utter incomprehension. I think maybe I even opened my mouth to chastise the old man for saying something so ludicrous. Then the concept had time to percolate, and my mouth fell open again, this time in surprise, in awe.

Why don't I just put the bread in sideways?

I would ask you to hold off judging me for just a moment more and consider the following: I had just had a problem solved that would otherwise have followed me my entire life. Let's face it, I was never going to buy a toaster that was deep enough to fit the whole slice (in retrospect, probably because they don't exist). I was going to have to put up with that niggle till the day I died, and here it was solved. Grateful? I felt tuppin' indebted. It was too late for that particular slice, but I had the rest of my life to get it right.

Fine, go ahead. Why didn't you think of that before. Well, I don't bloody know, do I? I'm not, y'know, an idiot. Well, not completely, anyway. It seems like the sort of thing I ought to have figured out myself, but there I was catching flies in my mouth in my own kitchen (at 24 years old).

So judge me if you like, I probably deserve it. But ask yourself this question: what minor irritations in your life have solutions that you never considered? If this toast thing has shown me anything it's that a problem shared can be a problem solved, for good.

I'm not saying it's going to work on much more than the orientation of your bread products. My insomnia isn't going to have a 2 second solution, for example. But that isn't going to stop me seeking a further help, if I can't figure it out on my own. And I'm not going to keep putting up with minor irritations if I think someone might be able to provide an answer. Hell, if this toast fiasco has taught me anything it's that I have no reason to be proud about such things: I'm clearly not firing on all cylinders when it comes to fixing small miseries.

Better cheese on toast means a better existence generally. It's a damn good start. 

The Goldfish

I talk to myself a lot. Obviously I only do it when I am by myself, as I already attract enough disparaging looks when I venture out in public thanks to my general air of untrustworthyness. I debate with myself in the car on long journeys, I voice lists of task aloud, and I sometimes read out loud in the bath or in bed, because I’m a solipsist and like to hear the sound of my own voice. In all these things I am not alone. But mostly, when I talk to myself, I insult, berate and criticise my own actions and outlook, and with good reason: when I am by myself, I metamorphose into an idiot. Seriously. An utter dim-wit.

Clearly I am no Einstein when I’m in a crowd (at work today I spent thirty seconds trying to open the safe door against its hinges) but when I am alone it becomes ludicrous. It would be unnecessarily long and tedious to list every faintly idiotic thing that I’ve done recently, but I shall give you a few examples so you can see what I’m driving at.

Firstly, I am capable of some truly incredible acts of clumsiness. I occasionally have accidents that require a perfect storm of physical ineptness, lack of forethought and sheer ignorance. I once almost succeeded, no word of a lie, in choking to death on an ice-cream while sat at the back of a rave. My panicked, potential final thoughts, were consumed by the knowledge that the ice-cream would melt before my corpse was discovered, leaving the authorities baffled as to the manner of my demise. I haven’t touched a Calippo since: they are as treacherous as frozen confectionary can get.

I am also guilty of some spectacular negligence. Given a kitchen to myself and enough time to wander off distractedly, and I will happily set fire to a pan of water.

Finally I occasionally find myself engaged in acts of monumental hubris. You know how sometimes on Casualty some idiot gets rushed into A&E because they were trying to replace a light bulb in a pitch black bathroom above a bath full of water up a rickety ladder while listening to thrash metal on a personal stereo and having a distracted conversation with someone three rooms away? Yeah, that sort of thing is right up my crippled, scarred-for-life alley.

I am not unintelligent. I used to get answers right in school. I have held down various jobs, some for several years, without ever getting into trouble or being disciplined. So why, when I am by myself, am I such a flippin’ retard?

The answer is my attention span, or rather the manner in which I focus it. I cannot keep my mind focused on a single task for more than about four seconds, unless that task requires my complete attention. Things that require extended concentration (driving, video games, cunnilingus, that sort of thing) are all fine, as long as they last. You cannot get away with letting your mind completely wander during these activities, and so it obligingly stays put. This allows me, incredibly, to split my attention in the manner so readily available to other people, and perhaps even do something else at the same time. This is why I can drive my car and talk to myself at the same time, without constantly heading down one-way streets or into canals when I reach a particularly difficult sentence.

Things that require little attention, things that should be easy: that is where I generally come a cropper. Cooking is, normally, not a difficult task. Unless you are making soufflé or ice swans or something equally complex, cooking is really just a collection of small, simple actions: you do the things in sequence and at the end, food happens. But it is because the actions are normally so small, so simple, that I regularly fuck the whole thing up. It’s easy, and so you have plenty of time for your mind to wander, and mine wanders a pretty long way, coming back with its boots muddy and its cheeks red to find the kitchen on fire and the stomach pretty hacked off.

If I have one simple task to do, I will either get distracted and forget about it, or I will become bored and try to multitask unsuccessfully. When I play video games I get bored at loading screens and try to read, an impossibly task that merely result in my reading the same sentence four hundred times and invariably missing the start of the game. Whenever I try to tidy a room I attempt to accomplish every piece of cleaning simultaneously, which means each task advances infinitesimally slowly and I spend the entire time in a state of high irritation. I regularly come back from the post box with the letter I went there to post. Once I put the slice of toast I’d brought with me in there instead.

I don’t do this, crucially, when there are other people around. This is because I am a) more aware of my actions when there are other people watching me, and b) because when there is someone nearby I am less likely to let my mind wander. God knows what I was thinking about when I started choking on my Calippo, but I sure as shit wasn’t focussed on the task at hand, and that wouldn’t have been the case if there was someone talking to me at the time. I can carry on a conversation with someone else while I’m doing practically anything (cunnilingus is a hard one, I’ll admit).

The solution, then, is to either start paying more attention when I’m on my own, or start pretending that I’m not, if you follow me. They say you should always dance like no-one is watching. I’m going to start thinking like someone is watching, and see if that ends up with fewer burnt stir-frys, fewer home decorating accidents, and fewer ice-cream related near-death experiences. I’ll let you know how it goes.