City Limits

I have a love/hate relationship with the town that I live in. This is probably true for quite a lot of people, but seems especially relevant for me because I live in Norwich, a city that seems to provide everything I need.

Norwich is a sunny slice of nowhere that’s far out into the east of East Anglia, far enough that it takes two hours to get to London and at least three hours to get anywhere else in the world. It’s got no urban crime rate to speak of and when you smile at people in the street they often smile back, always a solid barometer of the locals’ mental state. It’s a lovely place to live, really it is. But it’s not exactly a happening town.

Unless you’re a student, in which case: Norwich is tupping mint. The entire city sometimes feels dedicated to higher education, so many places are there to better yourself through learning. Norwich is a small city with a tiny population base but it has a top 20 university, a university college of arts, and a couple of city colleges, all of which are prestigious in their own fields and specialities and all of which attract a thoroughly talented bunch of people.

Norwich also has as many pubs as there are days of the year, and some half decent clubs. It has some frighteningly awful ones too, but the drinks are always cheap and the girls’ skirts are short, and there is the aforementioned lack of street crime. If you are a writer, Norwich is also a fantastic place to reside. Notwithstanding the famous and talented authors who have come out of the city’s creative writing programs, there are myriad organisation promoting and publishing good writing in the city itself. Norwich and the Norfolk surrounds tend to turn up in the writing of any author who has spent any significant amount of time there.

So what’s my problem? Why aren’t I happy here? The first answer of course is: I am happy, I just like having something to moan about. Norwich has always, always been good to me. It has provided a safe, creative environment within which to grow, both as a writer and a person, over four (mostly pleasant) years. If that sounds a bit happy-clappy then good: I firmly believe that people deserve a chance for some happy-clappy personal development in their lives, and I have been lucky to find mine here.

I suppose part of my problem is that it is so safe, and so cosy. Nothing exciting ever happens here. The population is mostly white middle class, there are not that many people, and the music scene is developing quickly but can’t match that of larger urban areas. While I watched my friends move to exciting, vibrant cities, full of sex and drugs and waterfronts and skyscrapers and illegal street racing (possibly), I have spent the last four years living in a city that is the municipal equivalent of a nice hot bath and a hug.

Finally, it’s because my feet are itching. In four years a lot had changed. I have changed, perhaps majorly. Some of the things I considered to be a huge part of my life are over, some are just beginning. It’s time to look elsewhere for my adventures. It’s time to leave behind the person I was when I arrived, and only take with me the person I am now. I can’t sit on my heels forever.

In the meantime though, I give you this: my thoughts on living in a less-than-exciting metropolis, compiled over four years.

What to do if you live somewhere a bit boring:

1. Moan about it. Clearly. There’s no need to focus on the good parts, just complain to anyone that’ll listen about how boring the place you live is. It’ll help you cultivate that sense of existential ennui and detachment you’ve read so much about.

2. Leave. Obviously not for good (although if you do decide to leave, you don’t need to read to the end of this list if you don’t want to). Find what it is that’s missing in your city and go and do it somewhere else. Most people who complain about their town being boring are therefore looking for excitement, so the simplest thing to do is go and have an exciting time elsewhere. Again, for most people, an exciting time is directly linked to absorbing large quantities of alcohol and dancing like an idiot, and there are plenty of places that provide great opportunities to do so. The best thing about it is, you can leave all the consequences on someone else’s doorstep! Try and visit your friends in other cities regularly, wreck their place, and escape back to yours before the dust settles. Bring them a bottle of something (then drink it yourself) and leave them some vomit in their bath in exchange. Everybody wins! Well, everybody important wins!

3. Find yourself a filter. You can be louche and interesting anywhere, you know. You don’t need to be somewhere interesting first. Of course, if you were louche and interesting already you wouldn’t need this list, so we’ll have to find a stopgap measure. Drink and drugs can make everything seem a bit special, and will make you feel like Byron or Withnail or some other class-A fuckwit. It doesn’t matter what other people think of you, so long as you are having a jolly old time, so feel free to make a narcotic-fuelled nuisance of yourself until the wee smalls. One advantage of living somewhere boring is that the cold old world™ is less likely to start banging on your door the next morning (especially if you combine this option with the previous one, and leave your mates to sort through the detritus of the night out and their own hangovers, while you disappear to have your comedown privately in your nice clean house).

4. Become boring yourself. Try limiting your options in any given situation. Cultivating a taste for microwaveable food will remove the need for restaurants, saving you both money and the hassle of ordering. Watch what the people around you are talking about and then limit you conversations (and if you can manage it, your thoughts) to those subjects. Only watch telly between the hours of 12pm and 7pm. Only read publications with one-word, noun-related titles like Chat or Heat.


5. Become more interested. The human condition, en masse, is so stupendously vibrant and interesting that anyone with a working brain and a definite drive should be able to find endless amusement in even the most mundane situation. Unfortunately to do so requires quite a lot of thought, and thinking is pretty time consuming, especially with all the drink and drugs and whatnot. Actually, forget I mentioned this one, it’s rubbish. Go back to moaning instead.

Fresh

Ooh, a new layout!

Welcome to the new look Verbal Slapstick. You have ten seconds to guess what my favourite colour is.

Spike.

This blog is supposed to be funny, or at least, humorously themed. It would be inappropriate for me to provide concrete social and moral directives to my readers because I lack both the insight and the right: I am hardly perfect myself. The messages I try to convey through Verbal Slapstick are more the ‘after school special, just try and be nice to everybody’ clap-trap you can find inside any Sunday paper or fortune cookie.

This post is different, then, because it seeks to explore a particular crime, and speak out against it. I will make no effort to be balanced in my argument, nor will I attempt to justify said crime by anticipating mitigating circumstances, because I believe there to be none. It is a social issue that I feel comfortable discussing in some depth because I have both seen it firsthand and because it largely affects people of my age and broadly, my social background. It’s drink-spiking, by the way. I don’t know why I didn’t say that before.

Statistics are unnecessary, as is a Wikipedia description or similar. You spike someone’s drink by introducing a substance that they did not expect or want in it. Most drinks are spiked with chemicals that have tranquilising effects, ones that often either compound or mimic the effects of alcoholic intoxication.

I cannot ‘put myself’ into the mind of someone who spikes drinks. I can imagine, if I try really hard, a scenario in which I might murder someone. If I were the last of my species, doomed to wander the universe alone, and I confronted the being responsible for humanity’s demise in some sort of climactic battle (lightsabers, maybe) then perhaps I might, in a justified rage, kill him or her. Perhaps I can imagine, if my circumstances were lowered to miserable levels, stealing to provide for myself or my loved ones. I cannot imagine spiking someone’s drink. Nuh-uh, nothing doing.

The next thought exercise, therefore, might seem a little redundant, but let’s run with it. I’ll go through my own perception of drink spiking, and try and get as close as I can to the mentality of someone who commits this act.

Item 1: Drink spiking is an intended prelude to a sexual act. I find it patently unlikely that someone might get their drink spiked and then wake up in the middle of a long conversation about Kierkegaard with a stranger. People who spike drinks do so with the intent of initiating sexual relations with the person they spike.

Item 2: Drink spiking is the tipping factor in an act that would not otherwise have occurred. If you spike someone’s drink, it is because you don’t think you’ll be able to have sex with them without it. Again, I find it unlikely that one would want to have sex with someone who cannot reciprocate affection due to their own intoxication when an alternative exists.

Conclusion: Drink spiking is a prelude to rape. Obviously not a particularly difficult conclusion to reach, but one that should be stated. They didn’t want to have sex with you. You spiked their drink. This did not make them want to have sex with you, yet it allowed you to have sex with them anyway. Drink spiking allows individuals to circumvent the sexual consent of another. Sex without consent is rape.

Let’s go again. I’m getting a bad taste in my mouth, but I’m not done yet

Item 1: Drink spiking mimics the effects of excessive alcohol consumption. That’s how it works. You don’t spike a stranger’s drink in a teashop and watch them collapse into their sticky bun. Drink spiking occurs in places where excessive alcohol consumption might occur anyway, and masquerades as such.

Item 2: It is understood that excessive alcohol consumption may lead to bad decision making, and the occasional amorous encounter that might otherwise not have taken place. People do, occasionally, fuck people they might not otherwise have when they’re drunk. They do it because they are horny and their inhibitions are lowered.

Item 3: Lowered inhibitions or not, people still have the right to consent. Even if they’re extremely drunk, people can still say no.

Conclusion: Drink spiking legitimises sexual assault by disguising it as the accepted lowering of inhibitions that occurs with the consumption of alcohol.


General conclusion 1: People who spike drinks are rapists.
General conclusion 2: People who spike drinks are seeking to legitimise the act of rape in their own mind.

That’s about as far into it as I can go. Either people who spike drinks are rapists pure and simple, or they are trying to disguise the moral reprehensibility to themselves and the outside world but, and here is the thing, they are still rapists. Man, I’m getting sick of typing that word.

So what is to be done? How to curb the worrying spread of this crime? Well, the simplest way is to make people more cautious with their drinks, and this is what I see all around me in clubs and bars. Signs flash up on the mounted TV screens telling people to watch their drinks. Unattended drinks are cleared away by staff. Specialised straws and caps prevent access to peoples’ beverages.

All good ideas, each one effective in its way. But it strikes me that if the second of my general conclusions is true, then we are going about this the wrong way. Instead of protecting potential victims from the crime of drink spiking, we should be forcing potential perpetrators to confront the enormity of their actions. Shame is a powerful weapon in the enforcement of moral law. You’re less likely to drink drive if your friends express a low opinion of it. You might be less likely to kill someone in anger if a bystander called you a murderer. And anyone who spikes drinks and doesn’t consider themselves a rapist should be corrected. That’s what the signs in clubs should say. That’s what we should all be saying to ourselves, all the fucking time.

Everybody knows people. Everybody has parents, neighbours, colleagues. So everyone who spikes a drink is known to SOMEBODY. And that somebody ought to express their opinions on it. Drink spiking legitimises nothing.

Maybe I’m naive. In fact, I’m certain I am naive: perhaps even in this post I’m exploring an issue I know too little about. But I’m tired of taking precautions. I’m tired of hearing horror stories. I’m tired of seeing it happen to people I know. If I saw a sign in a club that read: ‘Drink spikers are rapists’ then at least I’d know they’d seen it too, and that at least they know what crime they’re committing.

I posted this largely because it’s been on my mind a lot recently. Now, hopefully, it’s off again, and we can get back to funny lists and alliteration next week. Look after yourselves till then.

Feed and grow

Yo. At the suggestion of the savvy and sexual Joe Williams I have (hopefully) sorted out an RSS feed with which to subscribe to Verbal Slapstick. You can find it over there on the right, underneath my profile picture. For all you technically minded folks out there it might be just what you need. It also means you won't have to keep checking back when I inevitably disappear of the radar for weeks at a time.

If you do subscribe, well, cheers. I really mean that: you keep this odd little ego boost on track. Peace.

Grief and upgrades

I learnt a new word the other day. Well, actually I try and learn a new word every day, to infuriate and patronise my friends, but this word was a little different, as it hinted at a concept – and beyond it a subculture of sorts – that I never knew existed.

The word was ‘griefer,’ and I doubt very much that it’s in the OED. I ran into it on the fun and informative website TVTropes, a place where any writer of fiction can easily while away a deadline or three learning about the cultural archetypes that help stories work (if you haven’t already clicked on the hyperlink I recommend postponing it until you have no pressing engagements, appointments, workloads or meals that you need to get through. The website is high-octane procrastination fuel).

A griefer is, in the simplest terms, someone who gains enjoyment from ruining other people’s experience in organised play. Basically, they fuck up videogames for their own pleasure. A police artist's sketch:

The term exists mostly in online videogame forums and chatrooms, where its existence is much debated and derided. The TVTropes page has an incredible list of observed ways that a griefer might muck about with your videogame experience.

This isn’t my first encounter with a completely new cultural concept on the internet, but it’s not like I’m at the bleeding edge of online memes. I’d do better in a 4chan message board than, say, my dad, but I’m hardly a huge presence on the information superhighway, or whatever they call it now. But I’m interested in the concept of a ‘griefer’ because it might be a completely new way of expressing oneself.

My first point is this: what exactly did griefers do before the opportunity to spoil other peoples games existed? Online gaming provides the twin buffers of distance and anonymity; annoying someone over the net might result in hurled obscenities, threats, or at most in a ban from the game being played. Beyond that, the person you’ve pissed off is stymied; they’re unlikely to show up and egg your house, for example. In ‘real life’ no such buffer exists: if you deliberately puncture someone’s football there’s nothing to stop them from pounding the snot out of you in retaliation. At the very least, you won’t be allowed to play, and here another difference from online games becomes apparent: because there are millions of games on thousands of servers, beginning and ending all the time, once a griefer has messed up one group of people’s online experience he or she can simply move onto the next one. Even if they are caught, booted or banned they can always begin again elsewhere.

Did this desire to seek gratification by spoiling other’s enjoyment always exist, or is it a new development? Are these the same people who knock over litterbins and smash peoples windscreens in the dead of night?

I personally do not think that it is a new phenomenon, rather an old one in a new garb. The online videogame revolution certainly did not ‘create’ the potential for griefers among the population; instead it provided a new and (mildly) destructive outlet for a certain type of person. And clearly if it occurs enough to have a TVTropes page dedicated to it, there are more of these people than might immediately be imagined.

This train of thought reminded me of a conversation I had nearly a year ago, not long after I started Verbal Slapstick. I was having dinner with my step-mother, and was trying to explain the purpose of this blog to her. This was quite difficult, partly because I was on my third glass of wine, but mostly because this blog has no real purpose, beyond my own vanity. It isn’t a diary, and it’s not really about things that happen in my life (save the things that happen in my head). I’m not reviewing anything, and I’m not, as many of my friends and colleagues do, gatekeeping my own media experience by posting photos or videos or anything like that. I get the occasional piece of free crit for my creative writing which is cool and much appreciated, but beyond that this whole platform is simply me hurling my own badly formed musings and self-deprecations into an indelible public sphere. Why do I do it? Because I’m an unremitting egotist and I think I know best, obviously. And if I didn’t have a blog, if the opportunity to blog didn’t even exist?

What my step-mum really wanted to know related to the apparent readiness of my generation to transcribe their experience for all to see. She pointed out that when she was my age, there wasn’t the readiness or desire to constantly communicate with friends and acquaintances, either by phone or online. People her age (and she is not, in truth, that old) are far less comfortable with keeping everyone they know posted on their likes, dislikes and movements. If, as has been argued, a blog is just a diary that you show to everybody, why the sudden need to show each other our private lives? Why, in short, was my generation so self-consciously media savvy?

My answer? Because we can be. It is my firm belief that human beings have a desire to communicate their experience and feelings that is so strong they will wholeheartedly adopt any new method with which to do so. Until we finally all learn telepathy and are able to instantly and accurately experience and empathise with everybody, we will boldly take up any new technology or concept that allows us a greater glimpse of ourselves and each other. Maybe, and this is mere conjecture, we always wanted the world to read our diaries. Like griefers, the potential is within us already: all things like the internet are doing is giving us new ways to realise this potential. Mobile phones have not created a desire for constant contact. We always wanted to be in touch with one another all the time. Now we have a way to do it. Is it any wonder that these new media forms become so quickly integral to the fabric of our existence?

All this leads to one final, obvious question. If the potential for mass media uptake, for instant and gregarious communication, even for the sadistic inversion of organised play, all already reside fully formed within us, waiting for an outlet, what other strange and novel patterns of behaviour exist in our collective psyches? A whole raft of behaviours, some which could become integral to the way we act as a species, might be restrained by a gap in our technological development, waiting for a bridge to to flow across, out into the world. It’s a potentially scary concept, la, but it sure is exciting.

ZOMG POLITICS!!!1!

Mark Twain (wordsmith and admitted coward: thus a solid hero of mine) once said that "in religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are, in almost every case, gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from others." (He also once said “all generalisations are false, including this one,” but it’s my blog and I’ll ignore what I like.)

Parliament is back in session, Gordon Brown is long gone, and David Cameron and Nick Clegg (referred to ever after by me as ‘Dave and Cleggo’) are sat up on the Conservative front bench. It seems that, for the time being at least, we have a workable parliament. Whether the coalition will last is something I am painfully under-qualified to comment on, and so we’ll nip any political comment in the bud early on, and move on to the funny lists and things in a moment.

I voted in the general election, and I watched as much of the coverage as I could before I really needed to go to sleep (shout out to my man Dimbleby, the guy’s a machine). I’m not going to comment on my voting preferences, although I hardly kept them a secret from people. This is the first general election where people of my age seemed to have real opinions, and certainly the first one where they appeared to vote en mass. I heard all about it through the most suitable medium for discussing political awareness: Facebook!

Go on, even if you didn’t put who you voted for as your status, even if you ignored Facebook’s belligerent demands to know if you voted or not, even if you went to the pub after work and forgot to vote (or live in Manchester), you were still a little tempted to plaster your opinion on the ultimate social networking forum.

It’s so easy to display your opinion on the internet that you might be forgiven for forgetting that you don’t actually have one! It’s the work of moments to hawk your badly-informed political venom into a public forum, and it’s a lot easier to be vehement in your statements when you’re arguing predominantly with people you don’t know, people you went to school with and will never see again, and friends of your friends’ friends.

With an unstable coalition government the chances of another general election in the near future are high. To help you make the most of this opportunity, here are some tips on how best to show your political allegiance next time around:

Joshua’ Guide to the General Election... on Facebook!

1: It’s probably best if you vote. Some idiot might point out that it’s a little hypocritical to criticise someone else’s voting decision when you can’t commit to your own. If you want to make a big deal out of NOT voting, make sure you let everyone know in advance that you won’t be going to, then remind everyone halfway through that the day that you STILL aren’t going to, and then round it off with a big message at the end, where you can lord it over the sheep that did make it to the polls. Remember, you don’t need to suggest an alternative, or even a cogent reason why!

2: If you meant to vote and forgot, you can always lie. It’s not like people can check. If you weren’t going to vote anyway but you forgot all the preamble mentioned above, just tell everyone you spoiled your ballot! That’ll make you look super active and politically aware, without having to really go into detail or think about things too hard. Win!

3: Make sure you post your opinion on the nearest internet you can get your hands on. To make sure your status doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, why not make sure it contains as much inflammatory rhetoric as you can manage? Why not something like:

[Your name here] thinks that if u voted Labour today the country is DOOOOOOMED!!!

Look at those extra exclamation marks! Check out those unnecessary O’s! Yup, no one’s missing that little beauty off their minifeed.

4: The internet can be a fast moving place. Once you’ve got your super insightful political statement up there, how do you know it won’t get pushed down the list by someone’s party photos or people telling you what they had for tea? Simply keep posting! Now, you can’t have the same status over and over again, because then you’ll look like an over-zealous political nutjob (and we’ll reserve that description for anyone who disagrees with you). Luckily the live coverage on election night provides you with the perfect solution. (Slightly) new things are happening all the time! The results are (slowly) coming in! Now you can repost your status to your heart’s content, only slightly varying the wording to match the latest (minor) development!

5: The following have no place in any arguments you might have over the internet: compassion, good taste, tact, empathy. Replace them instead with: statistics you took from the BBC website, wholesale copy’n’paste jobs from political blogs and of course FULL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS!!!! Try and chuck a general air of smugness in there as well.

6: Remember, Facebook allows you to think your answers through before you write them down. Don’t actually DO that, for pity’s sake, you’ll be completely missing the point.

7: Everyone knows that the only real way to win an argument is to get the last word. Unfortunately you can keep going back to Facebook after you’ve thought up a new pithy quip. There’s only one way round this: you’ll have to stay up later than they can. The problem with election night is that a lot of people have planned to stay up late anyway. Why not consider taking the next day off work, so you can power through into the early afternoon?

8: If you didn’t get the result you wanted, be sure to post the most doom-laden report you can manage. If the Tories get back in next time and you’re a Labour voter, try suggesting that the entire country is going to be strip-mined to support the super-cities where only the top 200 wealthiest people will be allowed to live. If you’re a Conservative, what about envisioning a scenario in which the Greater London area sinks into the sea under the weight of all the illegal immigrants? Remember, the bigger the black cloud now, the more you can say ‘I told you so' later (unless it doesn’t happen, in which case you can breathe a secret sigh of relief).

9: If your astute political appraisal turns out to be incorrect (and it will), then rest safe in the knowledge that, as long as you update your profile enough, no one will be able to find it, come next week.

I hope this guide was helpful. Please do use it, if only to indicate to me who I need to delete from my ‘top friends.’

Micro- actions, macro-karma

I’ve been thinking a lot about karma recently, largely because I can’t seem to keep my hands on my own stuff. A little while ago I lost my phone and got it back, to my own delight and utter surprise.

I know people who would have kept my phone and flogged it. Heck, I have friends that would have kept it. Even if they’d found it with their mum watching. It’s a good phone, worth a little cash, and I probably have insurance (wrong, hypothetical phone thief!). It’s a few steps away from a victimless crime, but I doubt you’d wake up breathless about it a decade later.

But I got my phone back, from a nice young man names Stuart who kept it for me. I got him eight Stellas in return, because I was grateful, but also because I felt the need to balance my karma.

I’m an atheist. I do not believe in any kind of guiding or interventionist God, or indeed any sentient presence with a controlling stake in the cosmos.

I don’t really have any great leanings towards spiritualism either. I think my general spiritual view of the universe could be summed up as follows:

Stuff just happens. It happens because it does. Just because it happens, doesn’t mean it’s anything other than stuff.

It sounds quite simple, probably because it is. I find my spiritual understanding of the world is easier to manage if I keep it within terms a moody teenager would be familiar with.

I do believe in karma, though. It sounds like a bit of doublethink again, but I promise I’ve got a bit of thought behind this statement.

The universe is not random. Everything that occurs has been preceded by a myriad of events that shaped the fundamental matter of existence to allow it to do so. In the same way, any particular event is also the next step on an even longer chain of occurrences that stretch off into theoretical infinity. Events only appear random because the universe is really, really, really really really complicated. Each step on the chain is so ludicrously insignificant as to be unobservable to you and me (we’re talking about atoms bumping into one another). Not only that, they occur at a blistering pace and are subject to the interactions of billions upon billions of other chains of events, all effecting one another in inconceivable ways.

The universe is not random. But it is far too big and far too complicated to interpret on any meaningful scale. Any complex design might seem like utter chaos if you can’t see the whole picture.

This is not to say, however, that human beings cannot interpret the world around us in a meaningful way. Luckily, we don’t actually need to have a fundamental grasp on the nature of the universe in order to make predictions about events. This is largely because the events that affect us are perceived on a macro, as opposed to micro, scale. The things that touch our lives are a conflation of millions of other smaller events, the workings of which are too complicated to measure, but the end results are perfectly observable.

For example, I decide I want to punch you in the face. Once I make my decision electrical impulses flash down my nerves to stimulate the muscles in order to extend my arm and smack you. For your part, the light reflecting from my body enters your optic nerve and is decoded by your brain as the beginnings of an attempt to smash your face in. This leads to further electrical impulses being sent to prepare your muscles for movement, as well as countless chemical changes occurring all over your body to prepare you for sudden action (adrenalin release etc). These tiny steps number in the millions.

But we don’t need to be in control or even aware of all these events. You have no perception of the things that are occurring above. But you see I’m going to punch you, you smoothly move aside, and you kick me in the nuts (you jerk, it was only an example).

For me, karma operates in an area between these two extremes. Say you do something nice for someone else. You might be able to predict that they’d do something nice for you. You might even be able to guess how they’re attitude towards you might have changed, and be able to use that in future to inform how you act around them.

Beyond that, you’re a bit out of the loop. You have no idea how that good deed makes them act towards other people. You have no idea who they might tell about it. Human lives, like the universe, are incredibly complicated, and there are simply too many interactions going on all the time to make any educated guess about the effect one event might have beyond a few steps in any direction.

As we’ve seen, though, a lot of ‘big’ actions are actually made of an amalgam of millions of smaller ones. So your one, ‘small’ good deed might be a tiny part of something bigger. The more good deeds you do the more likely it becomes that you are influencing systems beyond your awareness.

It is absolutely impossible that Stuart knew anything about me when he found my phone. We have never met, and are unlikely to ever do so again. It is also highly improbable that any good deed I have ever done for someone has found its way towards Stuart. I have had absolutely no influence on his life.

Someone sure as hell has, though. There’s a reason that Stuart was ‘nice’ enough to return my phone: he had been successfully socialised into that way of thinking by repeated exposure to similar good deeds, done for him by others. Again, it is utterly unlikely that I affected any of those people either.

But that’s not really how I choose to see it. As I’ve hopefully demonstrated with my punch in face example, just because something is impossible to measure doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. I consider my own positive actions to be a tiny pail in a vast sea. They might appear useless, but without their fundamental presence then the object would be different. No pails = no seas. No atoms = no apples. No brain impulses = no me getting planted in the goolies.

Every good action could be an influencing factor in another good thing somewhere, sometime. Likewise, every random act of casual tossbaggery could be an impossible minor contributor to an act of greater nastiness.

My point is, just because it feels like your actions are insignificant, doesn’t mean they are. They might just be a contributing factor in a system too complicated to really grasp. But if you keep doing it, and invite others to do the same, eventually those micro actions might end in macro results. And you might get your phone back. But probably not.

***EDIT***

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The Gentle Art of Hypocrisy

With a general election looming, my thoughts turn to those of hypocrisy. This sounds like a neat way to burst into social commentary, but as I’m sure you are aware I am woefully under-qualified to make even such a broad political statement. My own political views are a sloppy amalgam of laissez-faire liberality and socialist tendencies, mixed with a cynical view of humanity I got from reading too much Hemingway. Nope, in predictably solipsistic fashion it is my own hypocrisy I’m going to be talking about.

I have been struggling of late to resolve two different concepts in my mind. They have been dredged up by my own actions (which, as always, have been less than spotless recently) and the fact that I just read through all my old Preacher comics again and found the protagonist struggling with similar issues.

I like to consider myself a feminist. Whether I actually am or not is probably a matter for someone else to decide, but I give it a jolly good try. It comes naturally to my thinking that people should be treated equally, and in situations where contextual evidence suggests otherwise, allowances should be made. We live in a society with the ability to level the playing field of achievement in the majority of cases. We don’t use that ability often enough, but it is there. Therefore, the idea that someone might find their ability to achieve and be fulfilled limited by something as non-specific as their gender strikes me as ludicrous.

But, gentlemen walk on the outside of the pavement. My granddad always used to say that (R.I.P. mate), and I do it without really thinking. When I’m walking with female friends I walk on the outside so if someone gets hit by a bus it’ll be me. I go out of my way to help ladies in distress, even at the times (admittedly few and far between) when I’m not trying to get into their knickers.

Are general ideas of chivalry incompatible with a true understanding of the feminist movement? Am I being misguided and a little patronising? This question gave me pause. I was perturbed to realise that I might be being hypocritical and condescending even when trying to do a good thing for other people (even when I WAS trying to get into their knickers).

It is upsetting to realise how far this double-think extends into your everyday life. I say ‘yours’ meaning, of course, ‘mine;’ I am sure you lot are paragons of clean-living consistency. As far as I am concerned, I seem to be operating under several contradictory operating parameters at pretty much all times. My attitude to meat is one: love burgers, but consider myself an environmentalist. My attitude to narcotics is another: generally disapproving of the effect they have on social units (families etc), and won’t specify my own usage in case my Gran is reading this (since when do you use the internet, Nanny?).

For someone with a pretty high opinion of themselves (admit it, I AM pretty amazing), all this was a severe prod to the old ego-balloon. Can you still be a good person if you say one thing and do another? Are you being ridiculous if you persist in holding beliefs that you know to be contradictory to other beliefs you actually hold? I spent a solid five minutes feeling like a bit of a ballbag, I can tell you.

Luckily I came to a few conclusions that made me feel a bit better. When I sat down and thought about it, I was perhaps jumping the gun in condemning myself (either than, or my ability to rationalise my own failures has increased to monumental proportions, and I’ll never be self-reflective again).

Firstly, well, at least I’m practising, rather than preaching. I consider myself a relatively amiable dude, and I’m definitely not going to push my choices onto anyone else. If I say I think one way and then act another than it may be something I have to work on, but I’m not telling anyone else how to think or act. True hypocrisy occurs when you demand of others what you fail to deliver yourself (there’s a political comment in here too, but I sure as hell can’t find it).

Secondly, and most importantly, things are always more complicated than you imagine. My chivalrous intentions are not limited to the lay-deez. I make an attempt to do nice things for everyone, but the realisation of these attempts takes different forms. If I got out of my car and ran round to hold the door for a male friend, they might look at me strangely. The attempt at chivalry would backfire in awkwardness. If society were a little different, maybe I MIGHT do it. I think, or at least, I hope, that my attempts at chivalry are not made because they are what woman need or deserve but are what they will accept, and I’d like to do as much for everyone as I can. Most men wouldn’t mind me holding a closing door for them, and so I do that for everyone.

So perhaps I can consider myself a feminist and still help people with their shopping, and perhaps I’m still a hypocrite, but I’ve put a fair bit of thought into it. The alternatives? Either live a life of extreme consistency (apparently impossible for me) or ignore it, and risk being caught out and justly judged by others. Neither of these is particularly gratifying to me.

So I’m a hypocrite, as there are surely examples of incongruous thinking that I’ve yet to realise or deal with. But I feel a little better knowing that in areas where my own actions wander out into moral and societal grey areas, I’ve at least had a good think about why I act the way I do. If I come across something too inconsistent to rationalise then I need to do something about it.

In the meantime, I shall continue to walk on the outside of the pavement, I’ll just do it for the dudes I like as well.

Anchorage

I haven't posted a story on here in a while, and seeing as that is certainly one of the functions of this blog I suppose it's high time. Therefore...

It's quite short, I ran it off on a wet afternoon in the coffee shop. Any thoughts to verbalslapstick@gmail.com. Hope you enjoy it.

Bushes, barbecues and blatant sentimentalism

My last post was largely about sunshine, and the thought of sunshine can only lead to thoughts of barbecues. Surely eating outside, under the virgin sky, with a slab of meat thick enough to make your arteries shiver clenched between sauce-smeared fingers, surely this is the only way to be. Unless you’re a vegetarian. Or an agoraphobe.

Obviously barbecue season is a way off yet. It would be prudent to wait until the weather is a little more predictable in its generosity. No one likes eating in the wet and the cold; there are few things as pathetic as a rain-sodden barbecue. But I had a quick shufti outside at my back garden and thought to myself: “Yes, this is a beautiful and fertile land, here I may master the element of fire to enhance my repast. And probably have a few tinnies as well, and maybe watch the football through the living room window if I move the telly round a bit.”

It made me a bit nostalgic for other favourite barbecue spots as well. Firstly, the garden at my old house, which was a tangled and overgrown mass of briars and nettles when we moved in. I and my saintly, hard-working housemates transformed it over a weekend into a well-groomed and gravelled al-fresco paradise. I had the ‘before and after’ photos on my phone, and I would often amuse my friends and colleagues (and people on the tube. And sometimes people in the street) with the transformation, until I got wasted and lost my phone’s memory card in a club. Let that be a lesson to you, brethren.

The best place I ever had a barbecue was not particularly beautiful. Actually it was a scrubby patch of poured concrete and rotting litter out the front of my mate Mike’s house. It was bordered by a wall low enough to be fundamentally useless as a barrier, but high enough to fall over in the dark to comedic/painful effect. It was, therefore, completely open to the street.

So we’d kick back in ugly deck chairs, drink rubbish beer from warm cans and eat a beguiling but potentially lethal mix of frozen and scorched meat. Sometimes we’d chuck a vegetable kebab on there as well, although we would invariably burn that too. Tinny music would play through knackered speakers and all would be generally right with the world.

The best thing about it? People in the street would stop and say hello, with surprising frequency. Occasionally they’d be people we knew, and they were never too busy to scarf down a free burger, but more often than not they would be strangers who would pause and make time with us. It wasn’t anything particularly profound and I think we talked about the weather in every single case, but it was still pretty cool.

The front garden at my new house has a bush in it. It only needs the one, because the bush is unashamedly, ludicrously big. It takes up the entire space. I don’t really have a front garden, I just have an enormous shrub separating my kitchen from the street. It is so big and entrenched it could plausibly have already been there when construction began, and so the builders simply decided to build my house a metre of so further back. It’s straggly and itchy and I’m pretty sure it once ate a kid that was walking past. The only way I could have a barbecue in my front garden is if I threw a sheet over it and balanced on top, like a cloud from a Super Mario game.

So my front garden is, basically, useless. And it’s not the only one on my street that I would classify as such. Quite a few of them have impractically large pieces of arboreal nonsense taking up most of the space.

But, some might cry, the function of a front garden relates to more than its ability to contain a barbecue and a few chairs. This is a fair criticism (one which, as I hope I’ve made plain, I do not personally believe), and I will address is thus: what, in that case, is your front garden doing?

Is it beautiful? Is it a well kept and watered Eden, one that will both entrance and delight passers-by and show the whole world what a frightfully clever and organised chap or chapess you are? If so... well, good for you, I guess. You can go.

Or is it a grotty little mudhole that you barely have time to set foot in, let alone look after? Is it slowly filling up with crap and rubbish because you haven’t the time to get out and tidy it up? And it’s no good looking out of the window or up at the ceiling Mr. And Mrs. Majority, because I can see you back there looking sheepish.

All this got me thinking about wasted space, and how depressing we seem to find it. There’s always something nice about space which is being put to use, even if that use is simply letting nature do its thing. Apart from the 'hardy perennial crisp packet' and the rarer 'summertime used condom' there aren’t that many species flourishing in the front gardens of my street, and it’s a little disquieting to look at.

Picture a nasty, rain-soaked alley between two high-rises. All it has at the end is a crummy, tagged fence and, I don’t know, some mouldy cardboard boxes. Chuck some binbags down there as well. Looks rubbish, doesn’t it? Now picture the same alley, but build a solid little hut at the end, out of plywood, and put a motorcycle in it. Now it’s not just a crummy old alley, it’s a crummy old alley where you keep your motorcycle.

Am I the only one that seems to find the latter option preferable? Perhaps. But it always seems to me that a space being used for something is more... comforting, maybe, than one clearly going to waste.

Now, going out and tidying up your front garden is going to be a massive bugger. For one thing it’s probably still rainy outside, and it’s a whole lot of extra work that you could probably do without. I sympathise, I really do. I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to do about that bush.

But maybe somewhere down the line you might have a moment to step outside, and when you do, maybe you could give some thought to what you want the space to actually do. Obviously if I had my way you’d just gravel it, chuck some pot-plants on it and start making barbecue plans with your neighbours, but I can appreciate (just about) that that might not be everyone’s idea of a jolly.

There might be another use you could put it to, though. Or there might even be something you would quite like it to say about you, something you could achieve with a day or so’s hard work and then largely forget about. You could just plonk a sculpture out there. Or a birdbox. Or a plastic chair so that sometimes when the weather’s nice you can sit there with a cup of tea and watch the world go by. Just something, anything, that when you walk past it on the way back from work reminds you that this is my space, and this thing is what it is for.

I’m going to show that bush who’s boss at some point. I’ll probably shape it into something humorous first just to cripple its fighting spirit. And when I walk past where it used to rest I’ll occasionally think: “That’s where that bastard bush used to be. I remember how I laughed as I chucked its mangled carcass into the skip.” And, very briefly, I’ll smile to myself. It might work pretty well for you too. And if you do decide to put a barbecue out there, just remember who gave you the idea. I’ll bring buns, and mine’s a Kronenbourg. Cheers.