Tag Archives: relationships

Take Me Out to the Ball Game: My Vasectomy

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It was the day of my vasectomy. Or V-Day, as my darling Kate enjoyed calling it. We were deposited at the hospital by a friend, as both conventional wisdom and medical protocol urged strongly against operating a vehicle immediately after having my knackers carved like a pair of munching pumpkins. Kate was there to lend love and moral support. She also wanted to watch my operation. I’d already consented. She claims she’s possessed of an intense curiosity about the workings of the human body, but there’s at least a small chance she just thought it would be a bit of a laugh to see me receiving the surgical equivalent of CBT. They didn’t let her, even after we protested that men since time immemorial have had the option of watching their partners’ va-jay-jays being destroyed by childbirth, so why shouldn’t women be allowed to watch the crucifixion of their partners’ nut-sacks?

Despite the subject-in-hand being very much on my mind as we approached the front entrance of the hospital, there was very little fear circulating through my system. I’d told so many jokes about what was about to happen to me that the whole thing felt a bit abstract. I didn’t exactly swagger through the front doors like John Wayne bursting into a saloon, but then neither was I dragged into the building kicking and screaming like a toddler.

Emotionally and psychologically, I was somewhere in the middle of those two scenarios. I entered the hospital with the bearing of a man who was heading for something simple and nice and innocuous, like an eye test. That’s how big a deal I’d convinced myself this operation was going to be. I’d had teeth removed, blood taken, toes snapped back into place. I’d never relished any of it, but then neither had I resisted it. I’d just gone with the flow. So I was flowing again. Somewhere cool. Somewhere calm. I was chilled. Serene. Until, that is, precisely seven steps into the hospital, at which point I became Mr Jelly Legs McScaredy Pants.

Into whose hands would I be putting my nuts? Edward Scissorhands? Freddy Krueger? Jack the Ripper? The nightmare scenarios just kept piling up. Would one of my knife-wielding surgeons – still a bit squiffy from a few too many reds the night before – burst one of my bollocks like a soggy grape, and force me to spend the rest of my life limping and hobbling around like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine? Would both of them turn out to be testicle-eating vampire cannibals? I needed to know!

I was so visibly nervous that the surgeon who came into my little cubicle to deliver the pre-procedural pep talk had to lower his clipboard, and start talking me down like I was a guy standing on a high ledge… but actually with a lot less sympathy than that scenario suggests. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me, but the general tone of it was very much: “Would you like me to give you some time so that you can go and find your big boy pants, Mr Andrew?” I couldn’t fault him. His position made sense. A surgeon couldn’t very well take the risk that his patient might start gyrating like James Brown the second some cold steel skiffed against his spunky walnuts. To be honest, though, I don’t think my demeanour was helped by the fact that the surgeon had clearly been mandated to list all of the procedure’s potential problems and side-effects prior to me signing the consent form.

“I can’t tell you there won’t be any pain afterwards,” he said gravely, perched on his tiny stool. “Most people are fine, that’s true, but in some rare cases, and I mean very rare cases, you may find that your testicles start to swell up, and in even rarer cases they might spontaneously combust, firing your penis across the room like a torpedo. And if you’re ever erect when that happens, you’re a bloody dead man.”

OK, I’m paraphrasing a little. My recollection’s fuzzy. In saying that, I’m absolutely positive that he went on to say: “There was this one tragic case, where there was this guy having his left ball incised, and at the exact same moment some wicked old man died on the operating table upstairs, in the stroke ward – a real bastard he was, too – and his soul floated down, and the old man managed to enter this guy’s body through his sliced-open scrotum. Well, the old man possessed this guy’s body any chance he got. The poor fucker would wake up on the ward with accusations flying at him, everything from cheating at Bingo, to chasing nuns around the hospital and biting them on the ass with a set of false teeth he’d found in a bin. In the end they had to – and I mean, this is terrible, but they had to get that ghost – in the end they had to amputate both of the patient’s balls, and at least half the shaft. Course, by then, the old man had escaped into his right tit.”

I managed to remind myself that my decision to nix my cum-flow was in the service of not only saving myself the potential hassle of changing nappies at an age where I’d probably need to start wearing them, but of protecting Kate – her body, life and sanity. After that, it didn’t take long for me to find my big boy pants, and put them on to boot. I wandered through to the operating room, carrying my real pants in some sort of bio-bag (which, admittedly, is exactly where my pants belong). There were four other people in the room with me: two female nurses and two male surgeons. The surgeons stood on opposite sides of the bed, presumably because they’d dibsed a bollock each.

“*I* want the left!!”

“No, *I* get the left! It’s my lucky side!”

I lay on the bed with my gown resting limply against my body, the flap at the bottom drawn back to reveal my junk. It’s a strange experience, getting your balls out in company. It’s a surreal outlier in your day: get up; get dressed; have a coffee; go to work; kiss your girlfriend; walk into a room with four people…erm, get your balls out; and, em… then two guys stab your balls. It’s not an itinerary I ever expected to see outside of seeking election for the Tory Party.

As momentum steadily built towards the main event, the surgical team kept me distracted with a steady release of dark banter. As they chatted, they applied copious amounts of gel to my ball-sack. It was relaxing, ostensibly because I could easily imagine that I was some Roman Emperor receiving his royal ball-massage, instead of some filthy, frightened peasant who was about to get his sack ruptured. Which is precisely what I was. The pleasing illusion lasted for almost exactly as long as it took for a needle to show up on the scene. No amount of funny jokes or enjoyably slimy testicles could detract from the sudden and terrifying stabbiness of the situation. Worse still, I could see that the needle was longer by far than my flaccid penis. Admittedly, that’s not hard.

Don’t misunderstand me, dear reader. I’m not on Team Micro-Member. Once my Clark Kent-ish penis emerges from the cocoon of its Metropolis phone booth it’s a perfectly serviceable piece of equipment. It can even shoot lasers. OK, so it wouldn’t trouble the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records, but then neither would it have women writing in to the problem pages of Bella, their hurtful words printed under the caption: ‘My hapless hubby’s hung like a seahorse’.

I’m a grower, you see, not a show-er. But the medical staff can’t tell that, can they? Not just by looking: I don’t care how many penises they’ve prodded and stabbed over the years. They couldn’t conclusively and scientifically differentiate between a grower on the one hand, and a guy with a wee tiny dwarf dick on the other. Not unless they jerked him off first – and Christ only knows what side-effects they’d have to list before they could do that. For a few shameful seconds, though, lying on that table, it somehow became incredibly important to me that the four other people in that room understood that my penis had a lot more to offer aesthetically than just newly-hatched Witchetty Grub, and cocktail sausage on a beanbag.

Outwith the one-night stands of my younger days, I’ve never really been in a position where I’ve felt the need to explain my penis to a random stranger before. It’s an eerily novel experience. I guess I felt vulnerable. Ridiculous. Like a dog that had just been shaved bald. “Hey, you know those puritanical, Victorian-era sentiments around bodily-shame and conservative social comportment your culture has drilled into you all throughout your life? Yeah? You do? Well, fuck you: get your balls out. GET THEM RIGHT OUT!”

Men: I won’t lie to you. The needle going in was painful. It was like every kick or punch to the sack you’ve ever received squeezed into a syringe and stabbed into your belly in one hit. Shhh. Shhhh. Did you hear that, men? That’s the sound of every woman reading this muttering something about childbirth under their breaths all at once. Don’t worry, though. The operation itself was fine. No pain. It felt like a really weird catch-up with a bunch of friends, all of whom just happened to be looking straight at my bollocks.

Once both balls had been ripped and stitched, everyone left the room to let me get my bearings. After about ten minutes, one of the nurses came back to run through the post-op low-down. She became increasingly agitated by all the questions I kept asking as she tried to read through the after-care blurb. At one point she did a jokey little growl, held up the piece of paper, and pointed to a section half-way down the page, pulling an exasperated little face as she did so. This was in lieu of her grabbing me by the collar and screaming in my face: “MAYBE IF YOU STOPPED TALKING AND STARTED LISTENING, YOU’D REALISE I’VE GOT THE ANSWERS TO ALL OF YOUR QUESTIONS RIGHT HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!” By the time we reached the part where she was ready to ask me if I had any questions, I only had two, and neither of them were related to the procedure. One of them wasn’t even a question.

“I was just wondering,” I said. “Say there’s a real fire, and the alarm goes off, what happens to all the patients in surgery – do they wheel them out into the rain under a big umbrella and keep operating on them, or do the surgeons just make sure they’ve got a few fire extinguishers handy and keep going?”

I had visions of fleeing doctors trying to buy themselves time to escape by hurtling gurneys with unconscious people strapped to them down the corridors like curling pucks towards the flames. And shouting over their shoulder: “I wasn’t very good at that operation. You were probably going to die anyway, Mrs Blompkamp! Thanks for your sacrifice!”

“We’ve…” the nurse said, “Em, I’m not sure, really. That’s never happened to us here. Yet!”

I nodded contentedly. The question hadn’t been answered to my satisfaction, but I’d have to conduct the remainder of the research under my own reconnaissance. On to question 2: the one that wasn’t really a question.

“When you were out of the room,” I began. “I looked down at myself wearing this hospital gown, and then around at the room, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a strong chance that one day in the future I’m going to die inside a room just like this, wearing a gown just like this, too’.”

She didn’t quite know what to say in response to that, and who can blame her, so I filled the mounting silence between us with a mound of tension-breaking self-effacement. “And, yes,” I said, “I’m tremendous fun at parties.”

She smiled, but I could tell that I’d made her distinctly uncomfortable. She was probably thinking to herself, “Why are all of these small-cock guys such fucking weirdos?” I wasn’t finished there, though. “It’s your own fault for leaving me alone with nothing but my own mind for ten minutes,” I told her.

It was my mum I’d been thinking about. Earlier that year I’d spent her last days with her in a room similar to that one, while she was wearing the same kind of gown. My thoughts were probably the mirror image of the sadness her death inspired in me: the fear that one day it would be me. And now I’d just removed my capacity to create life. There’s a song in there somewhere.

Back at Kate’s, my balls were in danger. No creature on earth can make you feel as welcome as an excited dog. But after an operation like the one I’d just had on my baby-makers, our dog’s friendliness was a threat. Poor, sweet Lola was transformed in my mind’s eye into a furry, four-legged weapon – a propulsive ball-seeking nuclear missile with warheads ready to detonate both testicles: Hiroshima for righty, Nagasaki for lefty. There was no escape. She would appear in door-frames and hallways out of nowhere like the two little girls from The Shining. Every time she walked towards me I could hear the Jaws theme playing in my head. Thanks to Lola’s rambunctiousness, for the first hour I had to hop around the house like a Cherokee priest performing a rain dance (and making very similar noises, too) to dodge her happy-sack attacks.

They say that after an operation like this you probably won’t be able to have sex for a day or so. Dear reader, I was being jerked off at tea-time. Later that night, Kate was subjected to some of the foulest intrusions imaginable, and in their wake I found myself googling ‘Is Being a Fucking Stud a Side-effect of a vasectomy?’. Or was I like a Batman baddie, and this was my origin story?

“Ever since those goons at Gotham hospital snipped the wrong tube, this city can’t catch a break from RELENTLESS SEX MAN.”

There is actually some evidence to suggest that a vasectomy can – in rare cases – boost a man’s libido. Why didn’t you tell me about THAT one, Mr Clipboard-Face McSurgeon? Not that my libido is exactly lacking, the massive filthy bastard that I am, but there was something supercharged about the post-op situation. The volcanic power of it faded, so I can only conclude that this wasn’t a permanent consequence of my vasectomy, but some primal response to either the surgical segregation of my sperm, or the recent thoughts I’d been having about death. Which means… I had really great sex because of my dead mum? Great. Another one for the therapist.

I’ll leave you on a note of optimism, though. Men, I’m talking to you, again. Whatever pain you experience before, during and after your vasectomy, try to keep in focus the absolute best part of the procedure, which is four months later when you have to provide a sample of your gentleman juice to see if your willy’s successfully firing blanks yet. That’s not the great bit, although it’s definitely not a chore. But, come on, think about it. The sample needs to reach a lab in the hospital between 0930 and 1030 on a Monday, and it has to be fresh…which means…

Which means, my friend, you can legitimately phone your work and tell them that you’re going to be in late because you’re having a wank. And there’s not a fucking thing they can do about it. Your doctor will even back you up! (Although it might start a craze of fake Doctor’s wank-notes across the working population. “Dear boss, it was me what told him to crack one off. It was a medicinal emergence. Donut dock his wages, you bitch.”

I think you’ll find though, guys, that the work-wanking thing alone is worth walking like John Wayne for a wee while.

Jamie Does… Love Island

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I’ve never watched Love Island.

Mind you, there are a lot of things I haven’t done: stapled my testicles to my left thigh; performed a bungee jump using a bunch of dead snakes tied together; covered cereal boxes with black masking tape, strapped them to my body and ran through an airport shouting ‘bomb’. I guess what I’m driving at is: not having done something isn’t always a strong argument for doing it. Some things are better left un-done.

Still, my shtick is to see or do something new with a view to writing about it in an excoriating and/or self-deprecating manner, and what better opportunity for malice and mirth than having a crack at what I’m sure is one of the dumbest, most shamelessly hedonistic sex-a-thons the world has seen since Charlie Sheen got his knob stuck in the air vent at his local swimming pool.

So I watched Love Island. Three episodes to be precise.

And I think that was enough.

And by ‘enough’ I mean ‘too much’. And by ‘too much’ I mean I think I’m going to take my eyes out and roll them around in broken glass in case I’m ever tempted to watch Love Island ever again.

Though I’d never watched the show before, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. And lo and behold, shocking precisely no-one, least of all me, the title sequence was a montage of attractive, deeply conceited people casting off their clothes in slow-motion to the kind of music that suggested a sense of grandeur unlikely to be matched by the reality of a bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around a pool trying to fuck each other.

First up, the girls.

There was Siannise, a Beauty Consultant from Bristol with the intonations and mannerisms of Marjorie Dawes from Little Britain. She said she wanted someone family orientated and respectable, which begged the question: what the fuck was she doing on Love Island?

Then there was Paige from West Lothian, an ex of Lewis Capaldi’s, who described herself as loud and a drama queen, as if those were in any way positive attributes. I wish people would realise that honesty isn’t always the best policy: “I’m horrible, me. I wet myself on purpose every time I’m on the bus. I strangle turkeys for a laugh. My favourite show is Mrs Brown’s Boys.”

Leanne from London promoted herself as the life and soul of the party, a rather trite and vacuous thing to say, but I could tell that beneath her shallow and hedonistic veneer lurked the soul of a true romantic. “Might as well go for a handsome guy, because ugly, handsome, they’re all assholes,” she told us, “But it burns more when you get cheated on by an ugly guy.” Wasn’t it Jane Austen who said that first? Although Jane Austen probably wouldn’t have gone on to say that she loved builders.

Next there was Shaugna, a Democratic Services Officer who didn’t seem to understand exactly what she did for a living. She was a little more certain in her opinion of plumbers: she liked them. Sexually, one would assume, rather than just admiring their work ethic.

KNOCK KNOCK

“Who’s there?”

“It’s a me, it’s a Mario!”

SLIDES KNICKERS OFF.

I’ve got a little tip for you, Shaugna and Leanne. If you’re asked to list three of the most interesting things about yourself, and one of those things is that you like to fuck tradesmen, you could probably do with taking up a few more hobbies. Even try shagging a few scientists and people who work in the customer service industry to even things out a bit.

Sophie from Essex blathered on about the colour of eyes she wanted her babies to have. Yeah, Sophie, I’m sure the pulsing meatheads about to swagger into the pool area can’t wait to have a long chat about your maternity plans.

‘OH MY GOD YOU’RE GORGEOUS!’ the women all shouted at each other, as I smirked and thought to myself, ‘These women will fucking HATE each other in 3 days time.’ Turns out I was wrong.

It only took a day.

I think ‘Love Island’ does a great disservice to the word ‘Love’. I wish they’d just be honest and just call it FUCK ISLAND, and invite contestants of more average body types to participate. “Ah’m big Sharon fae Paisley, and ah fuckin’ love chips and gettin’ ma hole claimed.”

Next came the guys. There was Nas from London, a builder (yeah, I know, seemed like a dead cert with the ladies, being a tradesman and all, but none of them liked him). He kissed his ‘guns’ and stood with his hands on his hips looking all pouty, before revealing that he was after ‘a good set of eyebrows’. If he’d been on Take Me Out, they would have buzzed him into oblivion, jammed the buttons so hard it triggered an earthquake that swallowed the studio down into the hungry jaws of the earth itself. Still, he seemed like a nice guy, which again begs the question: what the fuck was he doing on Love Island?

Callum the scaffolder from Manchester was a little more on-message with his cry of ‘Get me in there. I want to see what the talent’s like!’ He never said as much in his intro-tape, but it goes without saying that he’s probably got Chlamydia. And such a vicious strain that his cock is now possessed by the virus, glows green and calls itself ‘Evil Claude’.

Ollie was next, a young, posh heir to a fortune and a Lordship who looked like Martin Clunes and sounded like George Osborne doing a Mr Bean impression. He announced that he was a cheater, and lived next door to Charles and Camilla, possibly labouring under the misapprehension that the wow factor of the latter cancelled out the disgrace of the former, when in reality the cheating bit was probably more palatable than his being neighbours to that pair of horse-faced weirdos. Ultimately, no-one really liked Ollie, mainly because he was a surly, brooding, conceited ball-bag. In any case, he was swiftly axed from the show when news broke in the real world about him molesting antelopes or shooting tortoises through the brain or something. I’d still maintain that murdering an animal isn’t as bad as inviting a girl over to your house only for her to glance outside and see Camilla putting the washing out.

Then there was Connor from Bolton, a chiselled but goofy-looking young man who looked like Pornstache from Orange Is The New Black mixed with David Walliams, a look that he topped off with the hair-cut of a monk. He very quickly revealed a whole deck of ‘RED FLAG’ playing cards, delighting the young woman who showed an interest in him by getting drunk and starey-eyed, before aggressively brushing her hand away and claiming that she hated him already. To paraphrase Paddy McGuinness: “Let the island… see the love!” Where’s the love?

Mike the police officer was last to arrive. His ‘aw shucks’ smile and gift of the gab did a lot of heavy lifting to off-set the predatory energy bursting out from his steely, tiger’s gaze.

The pairing system and the ‘getting to know you’ games seem to eschew the current trend for open and honest dialogue between the sexes in favour of a Weinstein-esque, Lack-of-Consent-a-thon, which is of course why the infernal shite gets so many viewers. I guess it isn’t called ‘Respect Everyone’s Boundaries Island’ for a good reason. Who would watch that?

When the guys first arrived, the women had to stand behind some love hearts, and step forward if they wanted to be coupled with the man on display. Poor wee Naz the builder struck out, with not a single lady even flexing their toe in his direction (if I was a contestant on that show, the five women would have poured petrol on the love hearts, set them alight and then retreated behind the safety of the flames).

Here’s the kicker, though. Even though Naz was regarded with shrugs of ambivalence from the girls, he still got to choose one with whom to couple up. “Well, Naz, none of them has given consent, so which one would you like to compel to share a bed with you?” Christ.

A later game involved the presenter reading out a fact about one of the contestants, and then asking a member of the opposite sex to passionately kiss the person to whom they thought it referred. It was all getting a bit too rapey for my liking.

I won’t deny that there was some small part of me – some sad, primal part of me – that started to get into the show, fooling myself that I was embarking on a psychological dissection of the mating rituals of the under-30s. When the twins bounded in with their blonde locks and big boobs, I correctly predicted almost instantly that they’d end up with Mike and Callum. I felt like a Club 18-30 Freud.

But by episode three I’d had enough. We all like a good gossip, men as much as women in my experience (although men pretend they aren’t gossiping), but after a while my brain started to rebel against the steady diet of intellectual nothingness I was feeding it. And, sure, there were some beautiful girls there, but if carnality’s your thing it’s best to either find a real woman, or thump yourself half-blind to porn.

I tend to resist the current trend towards inter-generational conflict. ‘OK Boomer’, Millennials, all those assorted generalisations and stereotypes. And I try hard not to sound too curmudgeonly or out of touch. Times are different. We’re reasonably free from strife. That’s great. Past generations suffered to make this world better and easier for the generations to come, not so they could make us feel guilty for being free or prosperous. But even still, I found myself sitting there shouting things at the screen like: ‘A good war, that’s what’ll sort out these preening fucking layabouts.’ And ‘Try doing your eyebrows in a trench, you oily, tattooed numb-nut!’ Conveniently forgetting the fact that my adolescence was spent playing computer games, drinking to excess, spending money on drugs and inflatable furniture, and sabotaging my romantic and sexual couplings at every opportunity, with not a war or a rationing book in sight. I was once just as feckless, fatuous and reckless as these young whippersnappers, it’s just that significantly fewer people wanted to have sex with me, and now that number is somewhere in the low single-digits. One. Me. I still quite like to have sex with me, so at least there’s that.

Anyway, I’m off to watch something a bit more worthy and important, to wash the stink of this fleshy tosh off my soul.

[cycles through Netflix for six hours]

[types FUCK ISLAND into Pornhub search box]

Humanity: Instagramming Ourselves to Death

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This week I learned that there are people out there in the world – actual real people, mind, not robots, not actors, not reptilian imposters from hidden realms hell-bent on our destruction, but people…actual, confirmed people – who use ‘Instagrammable’ in everyday conversation. Not satirically, not in sentences such as this one: ‘When I find out who it was that said it was okay to start using the word “Instagrammable” I’m going to wrestle their head off their shoulders like a bottle-top,’ but in sickening, humanity-damning sentences like this one: ‘Look at these new £500 trainers of mine. They’re so Instagrammable.’

I’ve only recently learned what Instagram is – fire-worshipping troglodyte that I am – and now I’m being forced to accept Instagrammable as a verb. It hardly seems sporting.

We’ve been taking photographs of ourselves for a long-time, even before photography existed. Hundreds of years ago, only the very richest or most alluring could hope to have their portrait hemmed within a gilded frame and hung on the wall of some castle or stately home. In my day, you had to wait a couple of weeks between taking a photo and seeing the results, so instant gratification was never a motivation. Even with the advent of Polaroids, there was still no easy way to weaponise and disseminate your photos to a wider audience for the purposes of stock-piling serotonin.

Next, we started taking selfies – with our phones, no less. I remember how long it took for me to teach my 1920s-born grandparents how to use their VHS player. Thank Christ they died before phones became cameras, computers and shopping lists all rolled into one. It would have killed them.

With the dawn of selfies we became both trophy and target; big game hunters hunting ourselves. We snapped ourselves next to famous landmarks, influential people, gaudy palaces, plane-hijackers wearing bomb belts, and the edges of cliffs, sometimes literally dying in the pursuit of the perfect photo.

Now it seems we’re living in an age where an object’s only worth is in how it buoys our image, builds our brand, raises our social stock or makes other people feel unworthy of the gift of existence.

What cunts we are.

First there was MySpace, and Bebo, and Facebook, and Twitter, where at least some semblance of meaningful dialogue was, and is, possible among the preening and screaming, but now there’s Instagram: where pictures reign and words die. Instagram is a corporate hell-scape over which celebrities flog designer hand-bags and douche-bags, and little people wave filtered snapshots of their little lives in a desperate bid to convince themselves and others that they actually matter. Spoiler alert: they do matter, but not because of a fucking dress or a designer milkshake.

It was milkshakes that brought this nightmarish new lexicon to my attention. I heard a segment on Radio 4 about ‘activated charcoal’, the practice of adding intensely-heated (or, to put it more wankily, ‘activated’) charcoal to foods because there’s some evidence that it aids nutrient absorption, and thus improves general health. They’ve been adding activated charcoal to milkshakes, and if you’re wondering who they are, the answer is = cunts.

My apologises for having dropped two c-bombs on you thus far, but believe me I’m exercising admirable restraint. This entire article could’ve been a Jack Torrance-esque flood of that same awful word over and over, forever and ever. ALL INSTAGRAM AND NO PLAY MAKES JAMIE AN ANGRY C***T.

During the segment they interviewed a chap who was marketing active-charcoal-enhanced milkshakes – as black as tar – on account of how ‘Instagrammable’ they were. Not only were they ‘Instagrammable’, but ‘Instagrammability’ is, apparently, ‘WHAT EVERYONE WANTS.’ A part of my brain died when he said that; the part that contains the concept of hope. If that’s really what everyone wants, I thought to myself, then allow me to plough my car into the nearest petrol station. Please feel free to upload my smouldering remains to Instagram. You can even crumble my ashes into your drink first.

Where does all of this end? Are we about to enter the era of ‘Instagrammable’ funerals? Posing for selfies next to the Gucci-branded coffins of our dearly beloveds? Or worse, next to their waxy corpses, their cold skin daubed with activated-charcoal?

“Oh. My. God. Kymbyrly, you’ve got to tell me the name of your mother’s Funeral Planner.”

“Delgado de Laga. He’s terrific. Costa Rican, gay, vegan, almost prohibitively expensive. He’s the whole package.”

“I absolutely MUST have him for my mother’s funeral.”

“Oh, did your mother die, sweetie?”

“She’s absolutely fine, but I hope she goes soon.”

“Oh, me too, I do so love an occasion!”

(both clap hands together and squeal)

The most depressing thing about the whole look-at-me ethos behind Instagram is that it works. We’re big fans of the veneer, the slick surface. We love a bit of flashy, flashy, shiny, shiny. If we weren’t so superficial as a species, so susceptible to flim-flam and illusion, then psychopaths would never be able to ply their trade, and Donald Trump would still be a virgin.

It works – it shouldn’t, but it does – as much as oldies like me who are teetering on the brink of total irrelevance hate to admit it. We’re peacocks, that’s what we are: preeners, strutters, rutters and nutters. Our big, beautiful brains are in thrall to the whip-hands of our bodies, and the broth of chemicals surging through our blood-stream. We’re horny skin-bags full of hot, angry soup. Everything we do these days seems to spring from a misfiring of the perfectly reasonable impulses to love, couple, copulate and procreate. We’re corrupted and corrupting.

The problem is that our technological innovations are taking us places that our Amstrad-ian bodies and brains aren’t ready to go; our inventions are evolving faster than we are, and it’s making us take pictures of cars and clothes and milk-shakes in a misguided attempt to fuck – and fuck with – each other. No species in the galaxy can beat us when it comes to taking something simple, and making it hideously over-complicated and painful.

We’re Vulcans trapped inside the bodies of Klingons at the mercy of evil supercomputers. Things are probably only going to get worse.

One day we’ll either be dead, or better.

Get the picture?

Read my scathing piece on greed and capitalism here: ‘To the Emperor, all but the Emperor belong in the gutter.’

To the Emperor, all but the Emperor belong in the gutter

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Major, Theodore; Man in Bleak Landscape; Wigan Arts and Heritage Service; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/man-in-bleak-landscape-162632

Modern life is awe-inspiring and hyper-stimulating, but deeply confusing, and to a maddening degree; made even more so by the myriad ways the rich and powerful have devised to deploy that confusion for tactical gain; lobbing fireworks and flash-bangs of panic and distraction at us to keep us moving, always moving: never stopping, never thinking. We don’t need much of a shove in the direction of distraction: our eyes are already blinded by the gadgets we clutch in our claws; our thoughts over-run by the endorphins they release into our brains, like we’re trained rats pushing buttons for treats.

We’re made to run the Orwellian gauntlet down every street, along every junction of the information superhighway, as we’re assailed on all sides by Facebook feeds filled with fakery and fury; the weaponised worthiness of a hundred-million keyboard warriors; and incendiary headlines that boom out their daily beat of hatred from beneath war-like, blood-red banners.  At any given moment we’re being accused of, or being pushed to commit, thought-crimes, hate-crimes, and crimes – to both body and soul – of every stripe imaginable.

We spend our days spitting out words as though they were bullets, rat-a-tat-tatting at people about values, identity, sovereignty, tolerance, intelligence, and truth (whatever that is). We wax lyrical about the good old days, the never-was golden ages of peace and prosperity.

Human societies have become so intricate and complex that we tend, more often than not, to ascribe commensurately complex motivations to the people who comprise them. This muddles and over-complicates the often very simple impulses behind the things that we do, or are done to us.

Take Brexit. We frame it as an ideological schism being fought at street-level among the ordinary folk, with the forces of progressive change, shared humanity and multiculturalism on one side, and the forces of culturally-conservative, insular and isolationist protectionism on the other: but what if we’re all just pawns being moved around to satisfy the unslakeable thirst of the rich and powerful for yet more money and power? Spoiler alert: we definitely are. (see the Private Eye article at the foot of this piece of writing for a flavour of the sort of behaviour that’s driving and helping to maintain the country’s current political and economic condition)

Some degree of fight is inevitable, even healthy, in a society. It’s the engine of change: the sword that breaks the chains of oppression, the fire that burns the old ways to dust. But what happens when those who rule over our lives – the oligarchs, the corporate heads, the media barons, the greedy dictators and the billionaires – turn the apparatuses of our freedoms against us? When they use smoke, lies and mirrors to set us at each other’s throats as they smile and sneer from the shadows?

We, the masses, the 99 per cent, are often to be found hacking at and goring each other in the gladiatorial arena, as the 1 per cent watch dispassionately from the high seats, occasionally deigning to flick a wrist to seal our earthly fates.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the 1 per cent have won, and have done so without ever having to fire a shot (not in this country, at least; and not recently). They convinced us that they were just like us, and we were just like them. They re-made us in their own image, minus the power. Made us ants who think we’re Gods; slaves who think we’re emperors, gazing up at the high seats of the Coliseum  and seeing our own face reflected. The belief that we have more in common with the greedy, the royal and the tyrannical than we do with our own brethren in the gutter is as ubiquitous and dangerous as it is sad and delusional.

It’s the worst kind of Stockholm Syndrome; the worst kind of twisted vanity. “They’re taking your jobs!” say the corporatocracy. “You’re paying for these people!” jeer the politicians. “They’re laughing at you!” cry the newspapers. “We, the people, shouldn’t have to accept this!” say the multi-billionaires.

So the people with their hands pressed around the throat of the body politic make a proposal. “Let’s make this country great again/take back control/drain the swamp/return to the old values/delete as applicable!”

“YES!” the people scream. “YES, YES, YES!”

And so freedoms are rolled back, liberties are re-claimed and vital provisions are shut down or torn apart: all in our name, of course.

And all the while, we, the people, scream at the poor souls on the rungs and decks below us, so loudly that we can’t hear the whips being cracked at our own backs. We cheer as the poor and disadvantaged are punished for the sin of being born unlucky, forgetting or ignoring the role of chance in our own fates.

When the policies rolled out by the hyper-rich hurt us, too – as they always do – we cry out in anger and pain: “This isn’t fair! Why would you do this to me? I’m worthy. I’m good! I supported you! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM, not me. This wasn’t the plan! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM.”

But you ARE them. The prisoners, the drug addicts, the jobless, the struggling, the single mother, the single father, the immigrant, the outcast. You’re as much them as you are the doctor, the lawyer, the electrician, the musician and the nurse. WE are in this together.

Never forget: to the emperor, all but the emperor belong in the gutter.

The way we’ve chosen to cover and govern our planet is absurd. We all crawled from the same primordial soup. For millennia after we were nothing more than scattered bands of cold and frightened proto-people, huddled together in caves and forests trying to fend off the darkness and protect ourselves from the savage indifference of Mother Earth. Always striving; barely surviving.

And then one day – we can suppose – a man looked down at his fists, or perhaps surveyed the pile of shiny stones and animal furs he’d amassed in his cave, and felt emboldened to declare to his tribe: ‘I am your King.’ And those four little words were powerful enough to bring forth a future world of crowns and slaves and jets and castles and guns and flags and great golden skyscrapers towering into the clouds as children, in countries not so very far away, choked and died in blackened, smog-filled pits.

Still, many of us think, It’s not so bad here in Scotland, or here in the UK. Sure, some people are unlucky, far unluckier than me, and life for all of us could certainly be better, but I’ve got free health-care, a relatively high life expectancy, a car, a TV, a house, and holidays. Things can only get better, right?

The dark ages may have stalled our species’ scientific and technological advancement for a millennia or so, but we’re in a post-enlightenment age now. Everything is illuminated, even the darkest corners of the farthest reaches of our galaxy. We can split atoms, land robots on asteroids and make the hearts of dead men beat in the chests of the once-dying. We’re moving forwards, right? Always forwards. Nothing can happen to drag us back, right?

It’s foolish to believe that the changes we make, and are made to us in turn, are irreversible; that progress is inevitable and unstoppable. History is cyclical, not vertical. World War I, World War II, Korea, Darfur, Vietnam, Iraq. The lessons we learn day-by-day die by the billion-load, year upon year; and like children, our species has to learn how to crawl, walk, talk and remake the world anew, every century, every generation, every blessed day. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong, but throughout it all our development is guided, stilted, thwarted and dictated by the rich and the powerful and the decadent, a set of parents whose cruelty, corruption and indifference leaves a stain on the souls of all the children of the earth.

How can you fight a group with the power to destroy the world? How can you vanquish a group who owns the tech giants, the media companies, and the banks? How can you vote down a group with tentacles that reach into and around every government and politician?

You can’t.

The only weapon you have is time. That, and an unwavering belief in our shared humanity; the resolution to keep hoping and trying for a better world, no matter how futile or unrealistic the outcome may seem.

Maybe with enough time we can remake the world in our image; force a new cycle of history into rotation: a perfect squared-circle.

We are the tide.

Some of us roar from the sea in crashing waves, some of us rise and fall gently at the shore-line, but day after day, year after year, together… we’re the ones who wear down the mountains, and turn the rocks to sand.

 

 

EXCERPT FROM PRIVATE EYE

“There may be rules against rigging the financial markets, but not if the move is big, brazen and political enough.

Last weekend Mayfair-based hedge fund boss Crispin Odey told the Mail on Sunday he would support Boris Johnson in the event Theresa May is forced to resign. The purpose would be to see through a hard Brexit. “If we walked away from Europe, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” said Odey. Not for him it wouldn’t. He admits to shorting the pound and would make millions from the currency’s inevitable fall even as it wreaks havoc on the UK economy.

While backing the man who calls leaving the EU ‘liberation’, Odey isn’t averse to the EU’s fiscal and regulatory charms. Eight of the 14 funds in his Odey Asset Management stable are domiciled in, er, Dublin, while just four are UK-registered (the other two are in the Caymans). What Johnson called the ‘over-regulatory instincts that have held the EU back for so long’ in his recent Tory party conference speech don’t seem to have stood in Odey’s funds’ way. Nor does it seem that, when it comes to the most important aspect of handling Brexit – making serious money from it – the billionaire hedgie thinks too much of his great political hope’s rallying cry to ‘believe in Britain’.”

 

Drag me to IKEA: The seventh circle of Scandinavian Hell

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My partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

I know, right?

IKEA.

No doubt as that acronym-disguised-as-a-word starts to settle into your consciousness you’ll feel first a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, followed by a wave of dread whooshing down your spine, and finally the taste of your own frantic, frenzied heart leaping and thumping in your mouth. You might even let loose a brown torpedo of terror down the back of your trousers. Who could blame you?

Next, the lightning, the thunder, the very earth shaking beneath your feet, as the sun turns black, the sky turns white, birds fly backwards, mice become accountants, clouds come alive and start eating people, monkeys marry elephants, custard invades Norway, all sounds on earth become the sound of Rolf Harris crying, petrol stations declare war on delicatessens, old people start exploding, and Theresa May’s head turns into a sandcastle of jelly that’s swiftly leapt upon by a suddenly tiny Jeremy Corbyn, who bounces up and down on it whilst dressed as a lion and playing the hits of Bruno Mars on the kazoo – which of course all sound like Rolf crying.

IKEA. We don’t say I.K.E.A. We say IKEA. There’s very little precedent for this. We don’t say banqyoo. We don’t say himv, bihhs, tisbi or hisbic. But we say IKEA. Not I.K.E.A, and not Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. But IKEA. Why? I’ll tell you why. BECAUSE WE’RE SCARED.

IKEA!

Say its name five times into the mirror and a Swedish demon arrives, splits you into 600 different sections and hides the Allen key. IKEA doesn’t sell furniture: it sells brimstone-studded time-bombs. It sells cursed artefacts. It sells evil.

The whole process from getting your new furniture home to having a massive mental breakdown to eventually filing for divorce is so vein-poppingly predictable that you could turn it into a gameshow. “OK, so Jamie’s opened the box and started unpacking his new wardrobe; he’s dropped a few heavy slats onto his fingers, some mild swearing there, but otherwise he’s doing okay. They’re off to a good start. He’s only growled malevolently at his partner, Chelsea, once, and she’s only imitated his speech but in the process changed his voice so he sounds disabled twice, so that’s all very encouraging. Jamie hasn’t started accusing the instruction manual of being part of a global Jewish conspiracy yet, and Chelsea hasn’t suggested that his incompetence at DIY might be connected with his small penis, so there’s still all to play for. OK, round one. How long before Chelsea chides him for being just like his mother, leading to Jamie smashing the wardrobe into pieces with the heel of his shoe while screaming racist abuse about the Swedes? Shall we start the bid at 15 seconds?”

The horror; the horror.

IKEA: those hallowed halls in which relationships come to die; that vast maze of uncertainty that herds its terrified consumers through endless iterations of eerie facsimiles of happy homes until their sanity starts scraping at the edge of their perceptions with sharpened claws, and causes their souls to bleed out through their eyes.

Nothing there is ever as it seems. It’s the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, but every last bit of it is room 237. It’s the labyrinth from Hellraiser 2, but with scented candles. It’s the labyrinth from Labyrinth, but with more goblins. You’ll find yourself falling to your knees and screaming things like: ‘A TOTTVIRSK SKAR-KOLSHEN FRIGIN?! WHY DON’T THEY JUST CALL IT A FUCKING PILLOW?’ and ‘WHY ARE THERE OVER 8000 EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT LOOKING BED FRAMES THAT SHARE THEIR NAMES WITH THE CHARACTERS FROM THE TV SHOW VIKINGS?’

You’ll find yourself pushing against a mewling herd of zombies as they coo and stare and drool and moan at configurations of furniture so bizarre it’s like their piles and patterns have been precisely arranged and interlocked to open a portal to Hell itself. If pain and despair suddenly became currency, you’d be a multi-millionaire. The worst is yet to come. You’ll catch sight of yourself in one of the many mirrors placed strategically around the store, and you’ll see yourself looking longingly at a set of brackets on a pine bunk-bed – an enraptured look in your eyes that should only really be directed at other humans, and only then during foreplay – and you’ll realise, with horror and helplessness, that you too are a zombie, no better than the wretches shuffling by your side, perhaps even worse, because you’re the one that’s nursing a boner over a hinge bracket.

And a little part of you will die, right there in that store, a little part of you that’s lost forever in the anti-septic graveyard of Scandinavian lifestyle consumerism. And you’ll cry. You’ll cry for your mummy and your daddy, for God and Jesus and Santa and Satan, and angels and demons, and lawyers and doctors, and even aliens from the planet Quanabongo Fattafafaloop. But it’ll do no good. A series of tiny little words will fall softly from your mouth, gliding to the ground as if carried there on the wind by parachutes. “I…want…to….go….

Home.”

But you can’t go home.

You can’t go home ever again…

Never.

Ever.

Never ever.

Yes, my partner and I took a trip to IKEA a few weeks ago.

And do you know what?

We loved it! It was fucking great! Seriously. I’m not messing with you here. It’s one of the best few hours we’ve spent together in recent memory.

How is that even possible? I’ll tell you how: because we didn’t bring the boys.

That’s what we realised in IKEA that morning – that blissful, peaceful, wonderful morning – that IKEA itself wasn’t the culprit; that there was nothing intrinsically evil about IKEA. OK, the furniture itself is still demonic, and expertly designed to throw the hearts of men into anguish and chaos, I won’t be swayed on that, but the place itself – the building, the people, the displays – all of that is absolutely, one-hundred per cent fine.

To paraphrase Doc from Back to the Future: ‘It’s your kids, Marty. Something’s got to be done about your kids.’

Our trip was like a million great dates rolled into one. We strolled hand in hand, turning to smile at each other every ten seconds or so like we couldn’t quite believe what was happening. No little hands were reaching up to bat our fingers apart; we weren’t running through fake kitchens shouting ‘COME BACK! THE BAD MAN IS AT HIS MOST PROLIFIC IN SWEDISH KITCHENS!’ and ‘WHAT DID I TELL YOU ABOUT SMASHING YOUR BROTHER IN THE FACE WITH AN OUMBÄRLIG FRYING PAN?!’; we weren’t standing prostrate with frustration and helplessness, our faces growing redder and deader by the second as the kids devised a million ways to test our patience and diminishing sense of human decency; we weren’t apologising to a succession of half-crippled old ladies rendered ever-so-slightly more crippled by our children ramming tiny trolleys into their ancient limbs.

We were free.

We cracked jokes, we talked, we laughed, we lay next to each other on a hundred beds in a hundred different softly-lit little stage-rooms. We even disappeared up the back of an aisle in the warehouse section to do something a bit naughty, so overtaken were we with the freedom of the moment. We ate those disgusting hot-dogs that everyone convinces themselves are the best thing they’ve ever eaten because they’re really cheap, and we ate them in happy, contented silence, still looking up to smile at each other every ten seconds or so, this time through globs of onions and dead pig (and turkey, and horse, probably); her wearing a ketchup moustache, and my beard so enriched with ketchup and mustard it looked like an English soldier from 1745.

At one point I started missing the kids terribly. I thought, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. They would’ve been giggling and laughing and playing make-believe in the little pretend houses, and asking things like, ‘What language do the polar bears speak in Sweden, daddy?’ and ‘Do there really have to be this many fucking different types of coffee table?’ Maybe it would’ve been great.

Then we spied a mother standing in the kids’ section, rooted to the spot on IKEA’s Hell-o Brick Road with a look of horror, fear, defeat and anguish scrawled across her features. Her kids were rampaging through the section like solid poltergeists, rattling toys, hurling teddy bears and bursting in and out of tents, an orchestra of high-pitched screams accompanying their chaos. Chelsea and I squeezed each other’s hands together all the tighter, and walked up to this poor, tragic woman, smiling beatifically at her like we were monks.

“We understand what you’re going through,” we said.

She smiled weakly at us.

“We left the kids with their aunty.”

I feel we were rubbing it in, ever so slightly. But do you know what? It felt good. We were winners. For once, we were the winners. That woman was like the Jesus of IKEA, suffering so that we didn’t have to. Reminding us that although we loved the ever-loving shit out of our kids, and couldn’t face the thought of an existence without them, we shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying three blissful hours away from their weaponised enthusiasm.

We skipped, we smiled, we laughed.

Thank you, IKEA.

It was heavenly.