Roger McGough:
The act of love lies somewhere
Between the belly and the mind.
I lost the love some time ago
And I've only the act to grind.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Rantings...
What's the point? No really, what is it? Most mornings, I have to draw on hidden reserves of strength just to get out of the bed in the flat that I cannot afford, in the neighbourhood I don't even like because it is plagued by gun crime and knife crime and every other sort of crime.
And, as I sit on the bus because the CityRail isn't working, the traffic emitting the carbon dioxide that will one day return as a tsunami to wipe out the grandchildren I won't have because I am probably infertile, I think of the chavs and the hoodies having underage sex outside the window and also of the al-Qa'eda plot to finish me off and I think that, if it doesn't, I will probably just develop a lifestyle cancer and the health service will refuse to pay for the drugs to cure me of it.And a solitary tear falls from my eye.
And when I finally get to work - where I must toil for hours to pay for the benefit scroungers who are sitting on their obese bottoms watching The Oprah Winfrey Show - I open the newspaper and I discover that the country called Australia cannot even manage to binge-drink properly.
Well, that's it, I think. We're going to the dogs. We're over.
If you missed the story (and you may have done, because, for some strange reason, most newspapers decided to hide it on page 765), it is my sad duty to report that, according to this year's Economist Pocket World in Figures, we are not one of the world's biggest beer-drinking countries.
There is not even a derisory nod to us on its list. In terms of litres of lager per head, the Japanese drink more beer than us. Mexicans drink more beer than us. Vene-bloody-zuelans drink more beer than us.
This is absolutely shocking news. And it just gets worse: neither do we feature in the list of nationalities that smoke the most.
In Lebanon, they're puffing away. Seems that, in South Korea, they can't get enough of nicotine. But us? Pah! We don't even smoke enough fags to scrape into the top 22. It wasn't like this in my day.
This book - which makes for extremely uncomfortable reading - also says that the number of people getting divorced has fallen. Male suicide rates have gone down.
Not very many of us are being murdered. We have one of the highest life expectancies in the world.
More tourists want to come here than almost anywhere else in the world. What are they: insane?
What's the point? No really, what is it? Most mornings, I have to draw on hidden reserves of strength just to get out of the bed in the flat that I cannot afford, in the neighbourhood I don't even like because it is plagued by gun crime and knife crime and every other sort of crime.
And, as I sit on the bus because the CityRail isn't working, the traffic emitting the carbon dioxide that will one day return as a tsunami to wipe out the grandchildren I won't have because I am probably infertile, I think of the chavs and the hoodies having underage sex outside the window and also of the al-Qa'eda plot to finish me off and I think that, if it doesn't, I will probably just develop a lifestyle cancer and the health service will refuse to pay for the drugs to cure me of it.And a solitary tear falls from my eye.
And when I finally get to work - where I must toil for hours to pay for the benefit scroungers who are sitting on their obese bottoms watching The Oprah Winfrey Show - I open the newspaper and I discover that the country called Australia cannot even manage to binge-drink properly.
Well, that's it, I think. We're going to the dogs. We're over.
If you missed the story (and you may have done, because, for some strange reason, most newspapers decided to hide it on page 765), it is my sad duty to report that, according to this year's Economist Pocket World in Figures, we are not one of the world's biggest beer-drinking countries.
There is not even a derisory nod to us on its list. In terms of litres of lager per head, the Japanese drink more beer than us. Mexicans drink more beer than us. Vene-bloody-zuelans drink more beer than us.
This is absolutely shocking news. And it just gets worse: neither do we feature in the list of nationalities that smoke the most.
In Lebanon, they're puffing away. Seems that, in South Korea, they can't get enough of nicotine. But us? Pah! We don't even smoke enough fags to scrape into the top 22. It wasn't like this in my day.
This book - which makes for extremely uncomfortable reading - also says that the number of people getting divorced has fallen. Male suicide rates have gone down.
Not very many of us are being murdered. We have one of the highest life expectancies in the world.
More tourists want to come here than almost anywhere else in the world. What are they: insane?
Memory Loss
I used my pin all the time, but my brain suddenly deleted it. I'll probably forget how to chew food next. I was queuing for a ticket at Bondi Junction when it happened. The train was leaving any minute from a platform at the other end of the station, so I was tense. To add to my woes, the person in front of me using the machine was one of those professional ditherers the Sod's Law Corporation apparently employs to arrive in your life at the most infuriating moments.
As time drained away, he gawped at the screen like a medieval serf trying to comprehend helicopter controls, confounded by one simple question after another - questions such as where he was going, and how many of him there were. I ground my teeth to chalkdust as his hand hovered over the touch screen, afraid to choose, like a man deciding whether to stroke a sleeping wolf.
Finally the prick was done, and once I had waited for him to collect his tickets and his bloody receipt, it was my turn. Having no change, I opted to pay by card. But just as my hand moved toward the keypad to enter my pin, a voice in my head whispered: "You don't know what it is." And it was right. I didn't. I scanned my head, but nope: my pin had vanished. It had gone.I tried inputting something that seemed about right. "INCORRECT PIN," said the screen. I slowed my breathing to clear my head. Rested my hand on the keypad a second time. Tried to fall back on muscle memory. Performed a finger dance. "INCORRECT PIN."
I became aware of the snaking, sighing queue behind me. Now I was the ditherer. A third bum guess would swallow the card, so I snapped it back into my wallet, turned on my heel and walked off, past the eyes of the queue, trying vainly to look as though not buying a ticket had been my plan all along, and everything was going smoothly, thanks for asking. Annoyed, I went outside and hailed a taxi.
As I sat in the back, I examined the contents of my head. The number had to be in there somewhere. After all, I've only got one card. One pin to remember. And I use it all the time, every day; in supermarkets, cafes, ATM's, stations ... everywhere. I realised that I'd better remember it soon or I wouldn't be able to function in modern society. Yet the harder I thought, the more elusive the number became. The only thing I knew for certain was that it didn't have a letter J in it. And that wasn't much of a clue. My brain had deleted it for no reason whatsoever.
I asked friends for advice. One told me to close my eyes and visualise my fingers on the keypad. Trouble is, I'm so scared of thieves peeking over my shoulder, I've perfected the art of making my hand look like it's entering a different pin to the one it's actually entering. When I try to picture it in my mind's eye, I can't actually see what I'm doing. I've managed to fool myself within my own head.
Someone else told me the key was to stop worrying about it and go Zen. Next time you're passing a cashpoint, relax: it'll just come to you, they said. But I couldn't relax. If you forget your pin, you have two guesses at an ATM, and two guesses in a shop. A third incorrect guess incurs a block, and isn't worth risking. Fail on your first two tries and you have to wait till the following day, when your guess tally is reset. All of which makes each attempt pretty nerve-racking - like using an unforgiving and incredibly irritating pub trivia machine.
Over the past few days I've approached cashpoints with misplaced confidence, only to suffer last-minute performance anxiety. It's like trying to go at a crowded urinal, when you're wedged between two men with penises the size of curtain rods, pissing away like horses. Just as a shy bladder refuses to wee, my brain refuses to dislodge the number. It won't come out. Not a drop. I'm impotent.
This morning I gave in and called the bank, ashamed. Sensibly, they wouldn't read my pin out over the phone, but offered to post a reminder. But because they're a bank, and banks work to an infuriating Twilight Zone calendar in which any task that would normally take five minutes in our dimension suddenly takes five to 10 "working days", I'm currently operating in that unsettling limbo familiar to anyone who's lost a wallet; you become a social outcast, carrying ID into your home branch and begging for some old-fashioned banknotes to tide you over.
Inconvenience aside, what's creeped me out is the thudding blank hole in my head where the number used to live. It can't be possible to completely forget something so familiar. Perhaps it was stolen. Perhaps someone hacked into my mind while I was dreaming and sucked it away through a pipe. Or perhaps this is stage one of my inevitable descent into thrashing, bewildered madness. What am I going to forget next? How to chew food?
In the meantime, if anyone's got any hints on lost-memory retrieval, pass them on. I've tried everything from getting drunk to lucid dreaming, and the little bastard is still hiding in the bushes, looking on and laughing. I can sense it. But I can't see it.
I used my pin all the time, but my brain suddenly deleted it. I'll probably forget how to chew food next. I was queuing for a ticket at Bondi Junction when it happened. The train was leaving any minute from a platform at the other end of the station, so I was tense. To add to my woes, the person in front of me using the machine was one of those professional ditherers the Sod's Law Corporation apparently employs to arrive in your life at the most infuriating moments.
As time drained away, he gawped at the screen like a medieval serf trying to comprehend helicopter controls, confounded by one simple question after another - questions such as where he was going, and how many of him there were. I ground my teeth to chalkdust as his hand hovered over the touch screen, afraid to choose, like a man deciding whether to stroke a sleeping wolf.
Finally the prick was done, and once I had waited for him to collect his tickets and his bloody receipt, it was my turn. Having no change, I opted to pay by card. But just as my hand moved toward the keypad to enter my pin, a voice in my head whispered: "You don't know what it is." And it was right. I didn't. I scanned my head, but nope: my pin had vanished. It had gone.I tried inputting something that seemed about right. "INCORRECT PIN," said the screen. I slowed my breathing to clear my head. Rested my hand on the keypad a second time. Tried to fall back on muscle memory. Performed a finger dance. "INCORRECT PIN."
I became aware of the snaking, sighing queue behind me. Now I was the ditherer. A third bum guess would swallow the card, so I snapped it back into my wallet, turned on my heel and walked off, past the eyes of the queue, trying vainly to look as though not buying a ticket had been my plan all along, and everything was going smoothly, thanks for asking. Annoyed, I went outside and hailed a taxi.
As I sat in the back, I examined the contents of my head. The number had to be in there somewhere. After all, I've only got one card. One pin to remember. And I use it all the time, every day; in supermarkets, cafes, ATM's, stations ... everywhere. I realised that I'd better remember it soon or I wouldn't be able to function in modern society. Yet the harder I thought, the more elusive the number became. The only thing I knew for certain was that it didn't have a letter J in it. And that wasn't much of a clue. My brain had deleted it for no reason whatsoever.
I asked friends for advice. One told me to close my eyes and visualise my fingers on the keypad. Trouble is, I'm so scared of thieves peeking over my shoulder, I've perfected the art of making my hand look like it's entering a different pin to the one it's actually entering. When I try to picture it in my mind's eye, I can't actually see what I'm doing. I've managed to fool myself within my own head.
Someone else told me the key was to stop worrying about it and go Zen. Next time you're passing a cashpoint, relax: it'll just come to you, they said. But I couldn't relax. If you forget your pin, you have two guesses at an ATM, and two guesses in a shop. A third incorrect guess incurs a block, and isn't worth risking. Fail on your first two tries and you have to wait till the following day, when your guess tally is reset. All of which makes each attempt pretty nerve-racking - like using an unforgiving and incredibly irritating pub trivia machine.
Over the past few days I've approached cashpoints with misplaced confidence, only to suffer last-minute performance anxiety. It's like trying to go at a crowded urinal, when you're wedged between two men with penises the size of curtain rods, pissing away like horses. Just as a shy bladder refuses to wee, my brain refuses to dislodge the number. It won't come out. Not a drop. I'm impotent.
This morning I gave in and called the bank, ashamed. Sensibly, they wouldn't read my pin out over the phone, but offered to post a reminder. But because they're a bank, and banks work to an infuriating Twilight Zone calendar in which any task that would normally take five minutes in our dimension suddenly takes five to 10 "working days", I'm currently operating in that unsettling limbo familiar to anyone who's lost a wallet; you become a social outcast, carrying ID into your home branch and begging for some old-fashioned banknotes to tide you over.
Inconvenience aside, what's creeped me out is the thudding blank hole in my head where the number used to live. It can't be possible to completely forget something so familiar. Perhaps it was stolen. Perhaps someone hacked into my mind while I was dreaming and sucked it away through a pipe. Or perhaps this is stage one of my inevitable descent into thrashing, bewildered madness. What am I going to forget next? How to chew food?
In the meantime, if anyone's got any hints on lost-memory retrieval, pass them on. I've tried everything from getting drunk to lucid dreaming, and the little bastard is still hiding in the bushes, looking on and laughing. I can sense it. But I can't see it.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Sleep addiction!
Why would Amy Winehouse resist going to rehab? I wouldn't mind having a few weeks totally cut off from the world where no one could reach me and the sole objective was to talk about myself and my problems. Then get a pat on the back. What's not to like?
I tried to get into Promises, the exclusive treatment centre in Malibu, but they wouldn't have me. My addictions didn't qualify. "Do you have a drinking problem?" No. "Drugs?" No. "Sex addiction?" I wish. I told them I was addicted to suffering. But that was too vague.
Now all of a sudden, there's a new addiction. Nobody's sleeping. Heath Ledger wasn't sleeping. Britney Spears isn't sleeping. Justin Chambers from Gray's Anatomy just checked into rehab for not sleeping.
I have the opposite problem. I'm addicted to sleeping. From the moment I wake up all that I look forward to is going back to bed. The other night I was out to dinner with friends and as soon as the bill arrived I perked up. I knew it was only a matter of time before I could go home to bed. Then it hit me: I was more excited at the thought of going to sleep than I had been at any point during the dinner.
I'm stuck with an addiction that gets no sympathy. Everyone's concerned when someone is not sleeping but no one cares about those of us who oversleep. It's not an excuse for anything.
No one ever says, "Oh the poor thing – He's sleeping too much." Or, "He looks way too rested. No wonder he's not got no social life." I realise people mainly get addicted to things that are bad for them. And too much of anything isn't healthy. But how come you never hear of anyone addicted to apples? You never hear anyone say: her apple addiction is out of control.
The last time I went to the gym I had to drag myself from under the duvet to get there. On the treadmill, I know some people visualise climbing a mountain to spur themselves on – I visualised climbing back into bed. While I was there I overheard one woman tell her friend she was addicted to exercise. Why can't I have that? That sounds ideal. I would love to feel compelled to get in shape.
Not only am I addicted to something that's unsympathetic, but during the times when this addiction could be useful, it doesn't work. I can't sleep on planes.
Maybe it's genetic. I remember my mother sleeping frequently and waking at noon. My father was always a strong sleeper too. I'll just blame them. If only I were in rehab I'd be able to talk about it.
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