Breaking the naughty language barrier

Yesterday during a moment of mental pause, whilst on the rowing machine - I do some of my best thinking on rowing machines, a poor second to kayaking but what do you want, I live in a city where the only river is both biologically dead and underground - I asked myself to what degree my pottymouth may have held me back in life. I don't feel held back in life, I feel like I'm more or less where I want to be, lack of sexual congress with Tom Selleck as he was in 1981 notwithstanding, and I don't think having dropped the pottymouth would have helped me with that.

I think it came from my recent trip to Oxford. Rodelinda mentioned to me that she'd warned her friends I swear like a sailor, for example, and some of them nonetheless went glassy-eyed when I went off an a tear about something. And this in a country that has produced some of the most gifted, lyrical potty-mouths of all time. John Cleese dropped the F-bomb at Graham Chapman's funeral for heaven's sake.

But then I always find Rodelinda's British friends somewhat discombobulating. This odd, specific class of upwardly-mobile-middle-class Brits are bizarre. I don't understand what the hell they're still doing there, first of all; they can take all their pounds and go off and live like queens in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. I mean I don't pretend Back Home is Shangri-La, but it's at least a place where you can live in a house without tying up all your capital and where the social services more or less work, ie the police still serve a purpose besides ticketing the hell out of everybody and steadfastly avoiding any situations they can't reliably club their way out of.

And then this odd class drinks their faces off, make showing up hungover to job interviews and suchlike some sort of virtue, and fuck each other like the world's about to end - I mean, really make utter tits of themselves over their drunken promiscuity, and I say that as a former roundheels who's only got a few regrets, none of which involve wishing I'd fucked less. But break out a spliff and they go all trembly. This in a country where everybody else, besides this odd, odd in-between class, has a very close relationship with drurrrrrrgs. What is it? Why is it? Is it watching too much BBC following the government line about weed suddenly being a super-dangerous drug now? You know - this is one of the funnier things I saw there, 1984-ish coverage of the Afghan violence aside - BBC newscasters don't call it marijuana, they call it "cannabis", in this low, very serious, very worried sort of voice, like it's going to break into your fucking house and rape your daughters.

Fuckin' please, bitch. Please. It's marijuana for fuck's sake, people have been smoking it since the English were still wiping their asses with thistles, and somehow the world continued to turn until Americans realized in the early part of the last century that they're allergic to Mexicans.

Anyways. So far The Pursuit of Love is providing some answers . . . albeit archaic ones. Cracking good read!

Somewhat imbalanced

Reading The Pursuit of Love from Nancy Mitford and it's very good. Though don't have time to go into it this morning because I require a rant.

If we need any proof of the inherent sexism of popular perceptions of the the literary establishment, here's one: hardly anybody talks about the fucking Mitford sisters anymore, and a pair of father-and-son turds like Martin and Kingsley Amis can still make it into both the broadsheets and the Daily Mail. Neither have done anything more exciting than be massive pricks and follow conventional literary lines, versus the Mitford sisters, who besides having two excellent writers in their ranks, fought in the Spanish Civil War and got interned due to fascistic tendencies during WWII and had an affair with the French military chief of staff and shot themselves over Hitler and lezzed it up and testified in front of the House of Un-American activities committee and and and . . .

I'm gonna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench

M and I had a running stress-reliever - the word "Boner", which we made workplace-acceptable by referring to the Growing Pains character, who of course the presently missing Andrew Koenig played. Fucking best American television character name ever. Well, it's not unknown for people who were formerly famous cracking up and disappearing themselves, permanently or not, and considering it's been around five months since M disappeared it's pushing things a bit to freak out about Boner disappearing after M disappears.

But synchronicity, as an emotion or a perceived phenomenon, is a strange thing. It's there, certainly. Involved with a plain, garden variety sadness, in that I can't turn around in my office chair and say, or hear, "they can't get a Boner," "maybe Boner was dysfunctional", "I'm going to spend this weekend searching for Boner, you know, really reaching out" . . . or just "hey - Boner!" you know . . . tonnes of fucking comedy gold that aren't funny anymore because now M is missing, and even though this guy had the fucking awesomest television name ever I can't laugh about somebody being missing anymore.

No wonder adults have no fucking sense of humour. It must get harder and harder to laugh at things the more indescribably horribly shitty things happen to you and the people around you. Everything gets a little too synchronous and has this whole hollow weight of loss and sadness beneath it, which swallows up the giggles like a sinkhole. But would M have wanted me to stop laughing at Boner? Will me not giggling at the name make things better? Probably not. Anyways, who'm I kidding. The word "boner" is always going to be fucking hilarious. But I'll always remember M while I laugh at it. I guess the best way to deal with the synchronicity is to laugh enough for both of us.

Anyways. In terms of the emotionally devastating synchronicity it's not as bad as A-Ha announcing they were going to break up on the day (we found out retrospectively, thank you very fucking much, you fucking turd of a British Foreign Office - may you collectively catch scabies and scar yourselves indelibly with frantic scratching, may you find relief from nothing short of the rough side of a cheese grater, you pack of useless, irresponsible cunts; may boners always be remarkable in your beastly, functionary lives by their paucity) that M disappeared. He was the only non-Scando I've ever known who liked them a lot. Indeed, the only non-Scando who claimed to have heard a single song of theirs beyond the ubiquitous, and awesome, "Take On Me".

Speaking of, I assume you've seen it but just in case - I can still laugh at this, anyways. I guess if someone near and dear to me had been clocked in a pipe wrench fight I couldn't, so, well, carpe diem:



And to be fair, here's an A-Ha single from 2000, that M really liked and sent me as proof that they'd released things in English besides "Take on Me". Apparently Morten Harket (and it's not your imagination; the man is a phenomenal piece of ass, as, my Finnish and Swedish lady friends breathlessly inform me, an unfair proportion of the male Norwegian population is - something to remember if the F-word ever dumps my ass) holds a note for 22 seconds in it, which Wikipedia says is a British chart record, beating Bill Withers' in "Lovely Day".



Another difficult thing about synchronicity is that that song has moved in my estimation from being an example of a fucking marvellous falsetto somewhat wasted on a half-decent pop song with lyrics that make no fucking sense to something indescribably sad. I miss M. I miss him so much.

No wonder adults listen and get attached to horrible mawkish shit like Phil Collins or The Boatman's Call (I've had "Brompton Oratory" stuck in my head since Saturday and I'm getting resentful). Nothing is allowed to be funny anymore, and repellent, repellent turds like "I Can't Stop Loving You" suddenly assume this crushing emotional weight and substance. I guess I should count my lucky stars that M wasn't into anything worse than A-Ha. Well he was, actually, he was quite fond of Madonna. But frankly the fucking Nazis could have played that shit over the loudspeakers at Treblinka and it wouldn't have given it any emotional weight or substance. Fucking. Hate. Madonna.

Let it bleed

Now that my time left in Belgium is countable, I'm trying to quantify the things that I'll miss to help me appreciate it here, and one of them was demonstrated yesterday.

I have a scratch on my finger, a nasty one but I don't know how it got there, which suggests to me it was the cat from when we were playing, as her claws are of a surgical sharpness and it's not unknown for me to not realize she's put me in my place until I'm mopping up the gore some time later. Anyways, I went to the gym yesterday, and whilst fishing around for my membership in my pocket realized that the nastiness I'd felt when I was slinging on my backpack was the wound being pulled back open; I realized this because I had bled all over everything.

And the reaction of the man at the desk, as I narrowly avoided dripping on it and him, was to get me a band-aid and be very pooooor you, you just rush right in to the changing rooms and wash yourself up. No Seinfeld-ian disgust, no health-and-safety face horror, which I really appreciated, even though I thought in the grand scheme of things, there probably should be a little health-and-safety horror at least; I mean, I know my blood is lovely and clean but how could he?

I suppose when I move to Australia I can bid goodbye to that sort of shit. I think they get drunk and beat on each other a fair bit more than Canadians but from all accounts I understand they're also a good bit more health-and-safety than here, like us. And the upshot is that once in awhile houses collapse on people for no good reason here, and they don't in Canada or Australia, and that's bad, but then I can bleed all over the check-in desk of my gym and be sent off with a bandaid and a pat on the head to work out in it, and that's good, for me at least.

Remind me to wash my hands more often though.

I'd rather be reading

Reading The Secret Life of Trees, by Colin Tudge. So far quite nice. Very conversational style without being illiterate, which is something that the vast majority of popular fiction and non-fiction writers seem incapable of lately. And it's nice to read a book about trees by someone who evidently likes trees and understands many many people like trees who perhaps couldn't yet tell their haploid from a diploid. That is, me. Early days yet though. We'll see how it goes.

Also making my slow (and during working days, it is very slow, or slow for me, anyways) through the Men At Arms episode of the Sword of Honour trilogy. At this point, mostly fascinated with jacket blurb from Cyril Conolly about how this is the only WWII book guaranteed to survive to posterity. Really? Well . . . anyways it has its moments but I'm not completely enjoying myself and sneaking suspicions keep making their way in that I'd rather be reading the Trees book, and honestly - and maybe this is why it's a really good thing I never went into a university lit programme despite my propensities - I think Spike Milligan's war memoirs are about four times better. There's a sort of innocent cynicism to Evelyn Waugh that makes it almost a burden to wrap up. But it all hangs together very nicely.