Two Chaps Talking

Dear Boy,

The first truly seething day in the Metropolis and it’s like nothing has changed. The tarmac smells like a roasted ashtray, I’m sweating like a therapist and people are already talking about the idiot Henman as if there’s the slightest hope he’ll ever do anything more than fail quietly - not spectacularly, not even ignominiously, just quietly, pointlessly unable to be good enough.

I’ve been a bit slack, of late, with the correspondence. For as long as man has tried to turn ideas into written words there has been the nagging incubus of displacement activity. I’m fairly sure Philip Marlowe didn’t have an iBook and he wasn’t knifed in a Southwark coffeeshop with broadbandWiFi. It’s certain though, that, before dipping quill, he’d do almost anything to avoid the moment; rearrange the desk, paint the bathroom, take a leisurely dump, put the kettle on, go on holiday, make tea, get married, scratch, rearrange his CDs, buy a new dictionary, have a quick one off the wrist, anything to avoid making the first mark on paper. I’m told that Hitler only annexed the Sudetenland to avoid having to start work on an outline and first chapter for “Mein Kampf II - The Difficult Years”. It seems a legitimate argument that the Brontes were only as productive as they were because there was sod all to do in a rural parsonage.

(In the space between this full stop and the next sentence I have decided that I’d rather write this tonight, on the other computer with a glass of wine, gone home, played with the baby, put her to bed, spent two hours restoring an old camera, drunk the wine anyway, watched a rerun of a bad episode of Sex in the City and 15 minutes of a film involving not just Jean Claude van Damme but also Dolph Lundgren, found some smoked haddock in the freezer while looking for ice for a drink, decided to produce half a gallon of pureed fish and potato baby food, listened to a rerun of Round the Horne on the radio while cooking, reeled into a shower, slept, woken, taken the baby to school, gone to work, done my expenses… at which point I lose track and the will to live).

However, I’m now convinced that I’ve found the ultimate displacement activity as the Mem and I are trying to buy a new house.

I work in a business that attempts to make news out of pointless statistics so few of them really appeal to me but last year I read that moving house was the third most stressful thing that can happen to a person after divorce and the death of a loved one. I don’t really hold with the idea of ‘stress’ as it seems to have replaced the ‘bad back as the shirker’s excuse de jour. The experience is, however, the most monumental pain in the arse. Most of it, I can just about handle. Lawyers who seem unable to do anything without daily telephone pursuit and vendors who set prices using a ouija board and a crack pipe are merely enough to make me psychotically furious. It is the estate agents who reduce me to inarticulate apoplexy.

There are no academic qualifications required. The sort of financial talent you’d see in an illiterate goat trader or a small time loan shark are perfectly sufficient to the task of adding and subtracting large round-figure sums (they are allowed a calculator to check a ludicrous fee percentage). An essential ability to ingratiate themselves with both buyer and seller, while shafting both, and a hide like a rhino are the only other requirements. The hideous secret of the trade is, of course, that an estate agent needs no qualifications because he doesn’t actually do anything. He doesn’t value the property, he just checks what other people are charging in the same neighbourhood and calls it ‘market value’. Once he’s paid someone else to measure, photograph and advertise the property, he walks you round it, lying involuntarily then waits 'til you bite before handing the whole process back to your own solicitor and collecting a large fee.

It takes a special kind of person to turn to his careers master and say, in a loud, clear voice “I believe I should like to be an estate agent”. He must have already ruled out the more morally and socially acceptable options, child molester, for example, and have learned, to his chagrin that he’ll never show the requisite moral fibre to become a peep-show jism-mopper.

(Go to get coffee, discover machine has been switched off, switch on, go back to desk, tidy desk, find bill, pay bill, make coffee, discover there’s no milk, walk to garage for milk, remake coffee, retreat from Moscow, go to bed)

Sometimes, it seems like, the best way to get going is to find something that really pisses me off.

(Put on new CD, decide it’s time to digitise entire CD collection, begin feeding them into computer, satisfied that project should take around six months, go out for sandwich…)

I’m not one of those Europeans who hate America. As we’re constantly reminded, we would be a German administrative district were it not for their entry into the last war. It could be argued, of course that we have since repayed that debt. I definitely agree that we should have supported the US in this war, though I think we should probably have hung back for a couple of years and waited til the Iraqis bombed our fleet. No, on balance, I’m all for US imports. I like the odd hamburger, Sigourney Weaver, Dashiell Hammett, Charles and Ray Eames, the Cat in the Hat, Earth Wind and Fire and the Douglas DC3. What, I don’t like is this…

I’m standing in the sandwich shop and the oaf in front of says “Can I get a cheese and pickle sandwich?”

I don’t know, Fuckwit? Can you? Can you get one? Do you have what it takes in terms of motor skills and rudimentary cerebral function to go to wherever the bloody sandwich is, get it and bring it back? Personally, I doubt it.

It’s everywhere at the moment. The many headed have seen one too many US import sitcoms and suddenly ‘May I have’ or ‘Do you have any’ or ‘Please can I’ have disappeared. It’s all very well if you're talking to a girl on roller skates at the Sunset In and Out Burger but it sounds bloody rude in an Italian sandwich shop in King’s Cross.

Bring back bloody National Service, I say.

PS. I've been invited to Trooping the Colour this weekend. I shall, of course, report in full

Hey Ho

T