Godlike Gobshites

To bring the farce that is the NME’s renewed support of Manic Street Preachers to a close, they were awarded the title of Godlike Genius at the Brats last night. I’m showing my age now, aren’t I? I don’t think it’s been called the Brats for about 15 years. Still, I like the name and they only changed it to please some corporation or summink so yeah anarchy lolz etc moving on.

Dave and I flicked over to the coverage because he was channel surfing in the bedroom and saw the presenters taking the mick out of the ever ridiculous Simon Price. Knowing how much I despise the silly little man, Dave came barrelling into the living room to tell me to turn over and about thirty seconds later the Manics retrospective began.

It was a tedious piece of film to say the least. Talking heads extraordinaire like Jo ‘I haven’t been relevant for 14 years’ Whiley and Halibut Jones from New Order wanked on about the fact the Manics once wore white jeans and looked a bit like girls back in the day, apart from James, who looked like a hamster with a dicky tummy most of the time (as an aside, if there was ever a film made about the Manics I hope to BEJESUS they cast Michael Cera as Bradders, ignoring the tiny fact of Cera being 40ft tall and James regularly making hobbits feel lofty. If you tell me it’s not perfect, I’ll tell you you’re an idiot).

Meanwhile, Steve ‘Single Peanut’ Lamacq somehow managed to contain himself and not remind the world for the seventeen billionth time that he was instrumental in the whole 4Real shindig. He always looks so delighted to tell that tale. Granted, it has become one of rock n’ roll’s most iconic moments, but he essentially goaded an utter nutter to the point of violent lunacy in order to prove a point. Lamaqc’s cheery punchline of ‘But you’re getting blood all over the carpet HAR HAR’ has never sat well with me. Still, at least he ditched Whiley, which puts him one step up from all the others.

Once the dreary retrospective was over, the Manics themselves came up on stage to accept their dubious award. Nicky Wire looked so delighted that his mammoth ego had somehow been justified I was shocked he didn’t whip out little Nicky and congratulate himself right there. James Dean Bradfield stood where he always does at these occasions – several feet away, looking embarrassed while Nicky burbled into the mic. I feel for James. He’s genuinely very musically talented and by all accounts an alright bloke, but he always looks at Nicky with an expression that reads, ‘You’re practically family, and I love you to death, but for all our sakes just hush.’ Sean Moore was invisible, as always. Sensible Sean, he always has the right idea. I sometimes wonder if he applies the T-Rex rule to being in the Manics, the one we all learned from watching Jurassic Park: if you stay still, the gangly monster with the big gob won’t see you. Whatever his strategy, it works. Stay hidden, Moorus, it’s for the best.

Then came the exhibition of what has made them so great over the years: the music. They rattled through Motorcycle Emptiness with just enough gusto to make it worthwhile before bringing a dead-eyed Cerys Matthews on stage to duet on Your Love Alone Is Not Enough. She looked like she wanted to cry the entire time. E4 went to ads mid-song. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

Despite this rather sarcastic post, I really have nothing but love for the Manics, and Nicky Wire is certainly no more or no less arrogant than your average gangly transvestite bassist. But there’s something that just makes me cringe about them these days. It’s always been there, but it’s only during the last few years that watching them talk makes me want to look away, turn over, point out a car wreck… just do something that doesn’t involve paying any attention whatsoever.

It takes me back to a night working at the Hog’s Head pub in Uxbridge. After closing, we did a cursory toilet check and found a girl passed out in a cubicle, curled around the toilet. Her trousers were around her ankles and behind her lay a perfectly formed turd which had obviously just plopped out of its own volition.

Growing up with the Manics was a wonderful experience, but now they’re just that drunken girl with the loosened bowels. You want to have a little giggle, but it’s cruel. And you’re not just going to abandon her, because that’s crueller still. Meanwhile, she’s so blasted she can’t even comprehend building up a good head of shame at what’s just happened. So all that’s left for you is to be embarrassed on her behalf. Cringe good and cringe hard at the idea of her being so pissed she ended up having a little public poo.

You’ll never forget her and her fantastic faecal fuck-up, but you’re glad you can walk away as soon as it’s all over and take no responsibility for the whole dreadful situation.

The Borrower – part two

One of the highlights of my life is the arrival of my annual statement from the Student Loans Company.

For those not in the know, the beloved Tony Blair and his Labour government introduced student loans for anyone starting university in England and Wales in 1998. Tuition fees replaced the privilege of free education, and grants became loans, repayable on your entry to the adult job market. Essentially, the gravy train had puttered into Education Station and booted you unceremoniously onto the platform without so much as a bye or leave. Charmin’.

Of course, when you’re a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old the last thing you’re thinking about is repayment. Grown-up job? Get lost, grandad! I have missed lectures, traffic cone-theft and misguided dye jobs to be getting on with. Another Snakebite, anyone?

I entered university education with exactly this happy-go-lucky (read: utterly twattish) attitude to money. As a country girl heading down to the big smoke, I smugly grabbed at that extra grand of London Weighting offered, taking out a loan of £4,500 for every year I remained in education. Due to a balls up at A-levels regarding my ability to remember historical dates, I changed my course at the end of the first year and stretched my degree out to five long, long years.

I graduated from Brunel University in 2004. I had a 2:1 in Politics and Sociology, two proud parents and a shit-eating grin from the knowledge I’d somehow got away with writing my dissertation on the Manic Street bloody Preachers. Oh, and a statement from the Student Loans Company saying I owed them 22,500 beans… at some point.

Fast-forward to 2008 and that figure has risen to £25,518. I’m currently paying off the standard monthly rate for my salary, which doesn’t even cover two-thirds of the interest. Can I afford to pay more a month? No. I’d quite like to have a little money left after all my bills and debts are covered, thanks. You know, to piss away on a normal social life and that. Will I ever pay my loan off? I doubt it. I suspect it’ll just keep on growing until it matches the national deficit of the average Bush administration.

But it’s not all doom and gloom! I called the SLC this afternoon for an informative chat, and a nice Scottish lady told me that if it wasn’t cleared by the time I hit sixty-five the loan would be written off. Imagine that. Sixty-five. The most worrying thing is I think I probably will get to sixty-five and still be making those damn payments, and still only paying off some of the interest at that.

So the question I need to ask is this: was it all worth it? All that time I wasted watching Cash In The Attic in my pants rather than getting on the bus and attending another mind-numbing lecture on Bullshit Statistics For Pointless Studies II – could it have been better spent getting a job and working my way up whatever slippery ladder seemed right at the time? Probably, yeah. But it’s not stopping me seriously considering putting my limp excuse for a career on hold and seeing if I can somehow afford to do a Masters in screenwriting at the London Film School. I’m pretty sure we’ll all have been blown to bits by some sort of nuclear holocaust way before I hit sixty-five, so why the hell not?

That said, I suspect the Student Loans Company will somehow manage to survive even the most gargantuan mushroom cloud and, accompanied by an army of cockroaches and Twinkies, continue to bust my decomposing ass for many years to come for daring to want an education.

Bastards.

Doctor, Doctor! My colleague has no concept of shame!

I’m horrified by the general public on a regular basis. We’re not talking about the bad stuff here, the murder and the rape and all those terrible doings. I’m horrified by the really petty insignificant things.

Take this guy I saw on the tube last night - I’ll call him Bogies. Bogies was a reasonably smart looking bloke who sat on the Jubilee line reading something on his way home from work. He was wearing a suit, his shoes had a shine and his haircut was tidy. Pretty average looking commuter thus far.

What made Bogies stand out for me was his seemingly impossible-to-resist thumb. Every time he starting reading his document he raised it in front of his face and stuck his thumb in his mouth for a little suck. We’re not talking ‘I’m concentrating here, I need a little nibble on my nail’ stuff. Oh no. Bogies sucked his thumb like a three-year-old. All he was missing was a blankey.

Bad enough, right? A grown man sucking his thumb in public? Well, it got worse. After a few seconds of suckling, Bogies used the index finger on the same hand to rootle around in his nose. He was really going for it, excavating that nasal cavity like he’d heard it was full of gold nuggets.

Thankfully, he never stuck at it for long – he needed to make notes on his reading material, and this required the liberation of his thumb from his hungry little lips. But oh, for shame! Once the note was made the papers were back up and he proceeded to investigate the other nostril with renewed vigour. And this time whatever he found, he ate.

This man, this professional well-dressed working man somewhere in his thirties, was sucking his thumb, picking his nose and eating his bogies. In public. In a packed tube train. And the best thing was that he held up his papers in front of his face to do so, like it made him invisible.

I have news for him – it didn’t. I could not look away. My mouth was hanging open, my stomach was turning and my eyes were trained against their will on the entire gruesome spectacle. I. Could. Not. Look. Away. At one point the woman next to him glanced at me and I just stared back at her, gob open like a chump, eyes wild. She looked scared. I’m hoping that she realised I was flailing internally at Mr. Picky beside her; after all, she must have noticed his weird cycle of behaviour. Right? RIGHT?! Knowing my luck, probably not.

Thanks, Bogies. You made me look like a tube mental. THANKS.

The Borrower

On a cold winter’s afternoon in deepest Norfolk, I handed Eugene Hütz a DVD. He looked surprised, smiled and exclaimed, ‘Alison, you are exemplary!’

This doesn’t sound like much of an anecdote, but trust me, it has a point. I wasn’t handing over just any old DVD, you see – it was Eugene’s DVD. A DVD which belonged to Eugene. A DVD he had entrusted to me, the single worst borrower known to man, just two weeks before.

I’m not particularly proud of myself, but in recent times I have become a terrible person to lend stuff to. Just before her Hen Night, Simin’s fiancé Adrian was kind enough to lend me a couple of DVDs he had brought over from Australia with him. He assured me I’d find them funny, that they were the cream of Australian comedy. ‘Just bring them back next week when you’re here for the wedding,’ he said, a trusting and kindly smile on his face.

I still have one of those DVDs on my watch list. The happy couple are celebrating their one year anniversary this month.

And then there’s Fraser’s generous loan, or as I like to call it, ‘The Case of the Great Brass Balls Up’. Around a month before leaving the company we both worked for, Fraser gave me two brilliant DVDs – one was a documentary of the Serbian trumpet festival Guca, and the other was a drama-doc about Fanfare Ciocarlia, a pant-wettingly awesome brass orchestra from Romania. And oh, both DVDs are wonderful, especially the latter. I enjoyed them immensely.

Of course, the pleasure is almost entirely wiped out by the guilt – Fraser left my workplace at the beginning of August, and I’m posting his DVDs to him today, six long months later.

But nothing – NOTHING – can compare with my slackness over a certain Angel boxset belonging to Nasreen. I’ve been holding on to it for, I think, about three years. Three years. I’ve had that boxset for almost half the time I’ve been seeing my boyfriend. The worst thing is, series three ended on somewhat of a cliff-hanger. Almost certain a request to borrow series four would result in a swift right-hook aimed at my face, I resorted to reading a few Wikipedia spoilers and resigned myself to never borrowing another of Nas’ possessions.

This is the major downside to being a Bad Borrower – no one wants to lend you anything ever again. And rightly so! Be aware that to lend me anything may result in months of regret on your part. Regret, and probably anger. Because while I am many things, when it comes to the lending game I am anything but exemplary.

Blog off, blogface

I feel remarkably cheerful today. The sun is shining, the working week is in its death throes, and a nice man from the tourist bus tour company around the corner approached me in the street to tell me I’m beautiful, which is the kind of compliment I receive around once a century. The only thing cheesing me off is my inability to think of a better word for this shindig.

I hate the word ‘blog’ with unreserved passion. A friend of mine once described it as ’shudderingly naff’, and I have to agree. But what other option is there? It’s not a journal; journals exist to record the minutiae of everyday life, and this is rather somewhere to post the product of my frothing bile now and again. It’s not a diary for precisely the same reason. If I were recording my published work I could refer to it as an archive. Sadly, my only published piece of writing appeared about six years ago in monthly music rag Rock Sound, and it was treated with such contempt by the editorial team that they saw fit to riddle it with typos that weren’t there when I submitted it. Rubbish. So no, it’s not an archive.

This leaves me with only one choice: blog. Blog. Even thinking the word makes me cringe a little inside, and speaking it out loud makes me want to jump under a bus in order to rid the world of my stinking blog-saying self.

In my mind, there is no way blogging will be a truly respected art-form until a better word is found for it. Writing is a wonderful art; I write for a living, albeit throwaway pieces of hundred-word nonsense; I write fiction that no-one will ever read; in my head, I write epic essays on music that are published in respected monthlies. I love writing. But when it comes to the word ‘blog’, I find myself devoid of synonyms that will make me feel good about the whole process.

I need another noun for this space. I need that noun to be a verb, too, so I can feel warm inside while in the process of using this page. Until then, I fear that the act of blogging will make me feel like some sort of SugarApe employee. “Yeah, I’m like, blogging. Here’s a link to my blog and shit. I’m blogging in the blogsophere, yeah? It’s totally Mexico.”

An easy-peel M&S satsuma to anyone who can think of a better word.

Bollywood – Hollywood – Sleaford

Earlier this week my brother informed me of plans to make a film in Sleaford, the tiny market town in which we grew up.

Sleaford is famous for precisely three things: Jennifer Saunders, Abbi Titmus (local legend says she shagged three Chippendales in Legends when she was doing her A-Levels at the high school. I have no idea if this is true, but I’m going with it either way) and the Lincolnshire Rebellion. I know you all want to know more about this famous uprising, but you’re just going to have to chill your boots for the time being. This is neither the time nor the place. That said, I once attended a lecture by David Starkey on that very subject, and it was BRILLIANT. I love that historical creepy crust. He could lecture me on the history of bog brushes and I’d still listen with rapt attention.

My point here is that Sleaford is not the kind of town you make a film about. I’d call it a one horse town, but I can’t remember there being any horses in Sleaford ever. There was a monkey – the woman who lived near Castle Fields kept some form of ape in a cage in her garden; it bit someone once, bloody scandal it was – but no horse. It was a horse-free town.

Turns out that I’d missed a great bloody hoo-har over some obsessive Elvis fan who robbed the local council to the tune of £600,000 in order to fund her memorabilia collection. She was pocketing around a grand a week in loose change as she emptied the car park ticket machines and then buying anything to do with the quiffy Hamburgler, even if the prices were massively inflated. Once in possession of her latest prize, she stowed it away in her attic and never laid eyes on it again.

She was caught, of course, and at one point tried to top herself in a B&B in Skegness. It’s a sad tale. She survived, and, according to my mum, she’s out of prison now and free to roam the streets of Lincolnshire, searching feverishly for prized Presley tatt like a rhinestone Gollum.

My parents were in town yesterday. They were having one of their senior citizen days and catching a matinee performance of Jospeh and His Amazing Technicolour Hujamaflip. We met for lunch and I mentioned the Elvis thing. My mother’s eyes lit up. “I saw her in Lincoln! She was waiting to get the train home, and she LOOKED AT ME.”

Sarcasm is almost entirely lost on my mum, so I just smiled and said something along the lines of, “Blimey.” It seemed to please her; clearly all she wanted was some sort of acknowledgement that it was a life-altering moment, this being looked at by a sad and lonely woman whose passion for Elvis had got somewhat out of hand. She was carrying a HMV bag, would you believe? That’s right – a BAG. From HMV. And it had a COMPACT DISC in it. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s paid for that!’” said Mum, now fully in her anecdotal stride.

I swallowed my forkful of spaghetti carbonara and gave her a solemn look. “I wouldn’t joke; you’re the mother of an obsessive child… there but for the grace of God, and all that.”

She didn’t seem to understand my point, caught up as she was in thinking that one look from Elvis Lady was equivalent to being unceremoniously fingered by Harold Shipman. Back when he was bumping off old ladies, that is. Not now. He’s a corpse, and being felt up by his rotting remains would take planning and skill that I’m not convinced my mother would be able to pull off, even if she wanted to.

I chose not to tell her that a man had been decapitated and left in an alley just down the road from my house the night before. Something told me my mother wasn’t ready for the type of crime we’re used to here in London. And anyway, she was bubbling up with excitement at the idea of Connie from that Sound of Music talent search playing Lady Elvis and filming in Sleaford, no less.

The headless corpse and the Shipman-fingering analogy stayed safe in my brain. I suspect lunch was all the more pleasant for it.