Category: .

On a high from visiting the mood-enhancing Ellsworth Kelly exhibition in The Serpentine Gallery (I love galleries all of a sudden), with time to kill on a sunny day and a vague desire for a bitter row about something I don’t know or care about much with a total stranger, I thought I’d see what Speaker’s Corner looked like up close, as whenever I’ve been past on the bus it’s looked pretty lively. Unfortunately for me, last Saturday afternoon about half past three there was only one person there standing on or anywhere near an upturned crate: a very cranky-looking man with his mouth shut glaring at some tourists who were taking his photo for some reason (I seem to remember that they were Chinese).

We had the following exchange:

Me (feeling all full of springy cheekiness, having noticed that he is looking very pissed indeed): If you’re supposed to be one of those statues that doesn’t move, you’re not doing very well!

Him (scowling like George Monbiot would if he’d just heard that the Government had announced their decision to allow Tesco’s to take over Sainsbury’s): Piss Off!

Me (shocked): Whaat?!

Him (turning away with despair and contempt grinding his teeth): You’re stupid.

Me (still half-hoping for a proper argument, but fearing a row): How do you know that?

At which point he just stared into the middle distance and presumably dreamt of death, or drink, or both.

I might one day write a really long, boring wander around the keyboard containing my theories about addiction, but I’m not much of an expert in this field, I think. But I am starting to realise that I suffer (and suffer) from theory addiction. I also discovered that I really admire pure theorists, people who devote 99.5% of their time to Thinking About Things, and then Talking To People With Similar Or Opposing Ideas, like, you know, Brian Eno, or Momus, but not Bongo off of U2, the Pope or Noam Chomsky. I think I’ve met two such people recently (they’re easy to spot, they wear glasses, presumably because of nights spent reading absolutely everything on a very very long reading list).

(Sorry, when I said I’d met two such people recently, I was meaning the two intellectual types, I haven’t met the Pope or any of those other people at all recently. Although I did have a right old chinwag en portugay with Caetano Veloso on Saturday, so, you know, ¡Toma!).

I myself am not any kind of full-time student, alas, or at least not yet. Too, you know, busy with … stuff. Like … the gym! Ho ho ho. But I have developed a newfound fascination with hugely ambitious but clearly very insane Modernist-inspired Architecture (I have a kind of love-hate relationship with the Barbican) and a recent interest in town planning. Some one is responsible for the fact that Britain, uniquely for a a post-industrial society, has medaeival (?!) castles flying the standards of Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s strategically positioned throughout the land with great tactical military acumen. Ahem. But maybe too much thinking about how I’d redesign the city exposes previously hidden meglamaniacal tendencies reminiscent of Hitler, or maybe just Rick out of The Young Ones.

Imagine a degree course where you weren’t allowed to read any books! A bit like living in China, really, maybe.

I don’t quite know how we managed to get onto the subject of smashing up houses the other day, but something one of my flatmates said sparked my memory of an entirely embarrassing incident about 14 years ago when in a fit of very drunken high spirited hilarity we trashed the living room of the student house we were living in. There was a lot of bizarre behaviour involving a great deal of screeching as plants, books, any furniture to hand and a fair amount of messy food got repeatedly danced into the carpet. A surprising amount of destruction was carried out, considering there were only three of us. The following day I was woken up around ten by the sound of someone I surmised to be our fellow house dweller, someone who was by chance not himself a student (which may explain why this long-forgotten event suddenly turned up in my brain so very recently), bumping the hoover down the stairs. I must have conked back out, because the next thing I remember hearing was the sound of him dragging the hoover back up the stairs about six pm. He never spoke to us of that which he had seen.

My current flatmate, oddly enough himself a student, responded with a tale of a party he’d held where the Police were called out five times to try and calm down a very small terraced house packed to bursting with around 200 extremely excitable young people. After repeated attempts to find out from people who a) may genuinely have had no idea who the host was and b) were being very very friendly and not making any sense whatsoever, the Police just went back to the station and presumably waited for their shift to end.

Because what could they really do, in that situation? They could try and batter their way into the house while trying their hardest not to actually kill anyone, or they could, I dunno, just burn the fucking house down. Both of which would, without prior clearance from above, result in a fuck of a lot of paperwork and, in that worst of all possible nightmare scenarios for police persons the world over, an early retirement on a hefty pension.

Sometimes of course that’s exactly what they do do. And when they have special permission or instructions from above, things can get really messy and bloody. Not just when young people are enjoying themselves and potentially upsetting their neighbour’s plant pots and sleep patterns, but particularly when their very objective is to cause trouble and draw attention to themselves. There are countless examples of unrestrained police riots in recent British, European and world history – Orgreave, the Poll Tax riots, the Criminal Justice Bill protests, Genoa, the Candelaria and Carandiru massacres etc, etc, etc – not to mention of course very high-profile episodes like, well, the Tiananmen Square massacre springs strangely to mind. Somebody high up obviously decides that the maintenance of public order is worth a few cracked heads, broken bodies, piles of burning juvenile corpses and all that tiresome paperwork.

In the same way that parties and demonstrations can get catastrophically out of hand, of course, countries can too. Brazil became a significantly less fun place to be after the CIA decided to juntar-se à festa, and although I don’t know much about the nightlife in Indonesia, the British and Americans brought more than a bottle of wine and a big bag of honey-roasted peanuts to the party. There are of course countless depressing examples, and it’s not like they’ve suddenly decided that it’s wrong and they need to stop poking their noses into other countries’ affairs or anything – stai attento, Romano Prodi.

The US saves time and effort on paperwork by simply not filling in the requisite forms and posting them off to the appropriate international bodies, either before or after an invasion, unlawful bombing campaign, coup attempt etc, etc, etc. Now, there is an unyielding amount of paperwork to be completed in the relatively simple task of helping foreigners – many ironically enough displaced by ongoing imperial intervention in their countries of birth – learn the language and settle in a new country, so I can’t imagine the quantity of sheer bureaucracy involved in getting approval for a death squad to go around and slaughter peasant women in a bound-to-succeed strategy of installing a climate of insecurity and fear among the local population of some godforsaken central American country. All politicians claim to abhor red tape these days, don’t they?

Speaking of Latin America, what are the chances of another of the world’s Most Dastardly Oil-producing Countries (Venezuela) becoming the focus of a campaign of global media opprobrium, scare mongering and mass misinformation? I have a sneaking suspicion that after whatever disastrous Armageddon-unleashing campaign Bush & Co are planning for Iran has ended in, er, disaster for everyone but its somewhat opinionated new leader and anyone else who actually likes wars, the US might revert to its more traditional post-Vietnam policy of covertly making it very clear just what the consequences of choosing a different path from other compliant nations might be, through their time-honoured strategy of training and paying the country’s most criminally insane thugs to go on a unrestrained superviolent frenzy of causing pain and death to the poor.

Ahem. I may have rambled a bit from my original point but actually, now I come to think of it, if the burghers of our global village get anything like as much glee and fulfilment from their wholesale pillaging, slashing and burning of our planet and our common future as we did when we were ripping our own house to shreds all those years ago, we’d better hope that there’s some kind selfless non-student type to hoover it all up in the morning. Do you think they might be pissed?!?

I generally leave them lying around on the desk until I’m feeling energetic enough to gather them into a little jar which I then don’t ever get round to emptying. Whoever moved into my house in Madrid was in for quite a windfall if they could be bothered to count and then transport several hundred bits of shrapnel to the bank. But Someone Very Close To Me shocked me the other day by leaving a small collection of unused shiny silver coins uncollected on the table, which is not something I’d ever be inclined to do. She can’t be the only one with such a cavalier attitude attitude to 5p pieces, though; in the last couple of months I’ve been finding the things scattered around absolutelyfuckingeverywhere. Generally I pick them up, and I reckon I must have so far raised about £2.35 towards my Holiday Spending Fund (yippee!). £2.35 in euros is about €3.50 of course, and in Chinese yuan (as opposed to Welsh fucking yuan obviously) it makes about 35. In China that’s more than enough for a quite tasteful long-sleeved top which will set you back about £10 in the world’s official clothes suppliers, H & M (or ‘Hennes’, as my Slightly Irrational Ex-girlfriend used to insist on calling it in an ongoing attempt to demonstrate to me and the world just exactly how much she used to live in Finland) and which could last you anything up to a week and a half.

When I wander into a clothes shop these days I can’t help multiplying all the prices by fifteen, in order to get a more accurate sense of their actual worth in global terms. 5p means next to fuck all to most people here, but it means a fuck of a lot to most people in the country where most of what we wear is (fucking) made.

There are good tings and bad tings about having a slightly wacky name. Some of my favourite people have got in touch after finding this site while googlin’ around, which is good, but I haven’t saved myself as much money by not paying bills as maybe I should’ve. Sometimes, inevitably, people spell it wrong (occasionally very wrong, of course), like on my new contract, which isn’t much of a problem as I can just rip it up if I want. Although I have the feeling that this new job will increase exponentially the number of pieces of paper that pass through my hands, thereby increasing the confusion of what pieces of paper I’m allowed to or should rip up, and which ones I should treat with care. And it should allow me, here’s hoping, to get rid of the occasional tenner.

The thing is, I think I quite like ripping things up. I’d be sorely tempted to lie my way into any job which just involved ripping up bits of paper all day long. Or, even better (a bit of a dream job, this) burning flags.

Is that simply an-authoritarian streak, or something more meglomaniaquesue? I’m sure Chairman Mao, leading philanthropost Bill Gates, and fuck it, Hitler while we’re at it, ripped up a fair few pieces in their time. Ripping up bits of paper can be a gesture of pure authority or a unambiguous sign of a determination to replace that authority. Or an act of mind-blowing drunkenness, fury, contempt or fear.

Ahem.

Letters, bills, deals, treaties, holy texts, agreements, promises, money…I wonder were the most influential pieces of paper to have been ripped out throughout history? Or the ones that should have been? Which ones have I ripped up, and forgotten about, or opted to keep forgotten? And what pieces of paper would I, or you, put back together if I, or you, could?

At the mo, in the run-up to the Natal season, I’m not feeling very inspired. I mean, I have got some vague notes for a three-part thing about shopping, but it might be crap. I’ve also come up with something about my awful, awful flatmate, but for reasons of domestic diplomacy it will have to wait. For a month.

Howeva, reading about this me realise that occasionally, on a good day, I like to imagine myself as a hopefully slightly less boring and considerably more left-wing Alistair Cooke:

An investigation is under way in New York into allegations that the bones of the late broadcaster Alistair Cooke were stolen before his cremation.

Mr Cooke, known for the Letter from America he broadcast for the BBC, died almost two years ago, aged 95.

You can listen to his first ever ‘Letter from America’ here. And here is a tribute at the start of which you can detect where my aspirations lie.

Before you listen: I did not say they were not boring. And I don’t think I heard a woman’s voice at any point. Towards the end of the tribute you can hear the Cookie Monster, but it’s almost not worth waiting up for. You can also listen to the last one here, but I should warn you: he didn’t know he was about to die, and it shows.

Incidentally, I don’t know what it means to have your bones stolen. Anyone any ideas?

Click here. You might think you’re back on the same page, but actually you’re not. Now if you click here, here, or here, you will see a number of articles arranged by theme. Scattered throughout this site you will find a number of different tags, which act as a kind of index of the site. I don’t presently have time to provide an exhaustive list of them, but in addition to the ones mentioned above there are ones about China and Japan, Spain, Singaporisation and my own personal favourite, the somewhat clumsily named Young People in China, which I would change, but it takes ages to set up all this stuff, and I’m rushing out of the door to talk to someone fairly dull about something very boring, so it will have to do for the moment.

In fact, a full list of tags can be found here.