I Can Explain

I got trapped in a well and Sarah's arms fell off and also there were some manufacturing/delivery undesirables so we've whacked the jackanory back to Christmas 2015 yes 2015, to ensure its readiness and frightening dominance, a lot like when Nasty Ways was on dubplate for eighteen months and when they finally let people buy it Dillinja became prime minister for a week which is why everything is fine now, and if you don't remember this it's because either you were too far away or you had the wrong ears. It's not too late.

Finger

Three rolls of new carpet arrived and were immediately left in the hall for a week, taking up all the space and fulfilling, brownly, none of the functions of a new carpet except the smell. We would get back from work having forgotten about them and open the front door and they'd lurch at us, softly begging to be nailed to the floor, or however it is you install a carpet. But that's not our task, we'd say, patting their rumps and shaking our heads. Until the landlord gets her shit together you're just three colossal air fresheners.
And every night there'd be a long face to long face about the staggering untogetherness of the landlord's shit. And phonecalls and promises and apologies and Polish lagers, which on a weeknight is reckless and not to be encouraged.
And after three or four we'd sit on the floor in the hall with our backs against the carpets, reassuring them that any future spillages will be dealt with promptly, efficiently, and possibly erotically, but we can't promise the boiler won't piss its pipes off again because of the aforementioned widely-strewn condition of the landlord's dutiful cack. And you ought to be aware of that. And we'd sleep and wake up and work and forget and get home and there they'd be. It wasn't a satisfactory arrangement for anyone.

Within Working Days

A thing continues not to happen. It's up to me how often it hasn't happened because I find out whether or not it's happened by checking my email. So lots. For a while I was checking it fifteen times a day. Although I hadn't heard the new message ding I thought one might've snuck in while I was thinking about all the insurance I'd have to get for all the stuff I'd be able to afford if the email contained the right kind of news. And then I started imagining I'd heard the ding while staring into the potato cupboard or rearranging the cobwebs in the bedroom. And I'd hurtle to the computer but the thirteen thousand unread emails hadn't turned into thirteen thousand and one. And I'd leave the house and trudge up hills and waddle along ridges and plod down slopes and pinball through copses and springbok over trenches under overwrought javelin rain, hearing the ding come out of passing cars and handbags and tanks twenty times a minute thinking one of these must be a sign, and I'd get home and towel off and microwave a plate of the dauphinoise of the week and kick open the computer, drooling, and the number at the top of the leftmost tab'd read thirteen thousand and one, and I'd click on it, and there'd be an email from someone I'd never met, asking me to throw woe at an overlord to raise its awareness of a disease bonanza or boring old massacre, and I'd eat the dauphinoise thinking things are bound to get better.

Sounds Amazing

The cinema has a bin and after you throw your money into it one man kicks you in the base of the spine while another one laughs at your wallet. You are given twenty minutes to recover and then you thank them and carry on with your life. When I worked in a cinema it wasn't like this. To get the comforting blend of humiliating pain and disgust you had to actually see the film. But hard times promote innovation and it's good to have your foibles serviced. Now you still have to pay, but it takes far less time. And there's no fuss. You could go on Gumtree, for example, but it's impossible to get someone to do it for free unless you're filming them, and I don't have a camera or a phone with a camera, and if you offer cash you'll end up paying far more than you would at the cinema before they'll do it anywhere near hard enough. Even the Special Brew guys in the underpass lose their nerve just before they connect, and they'll often offer you a Valium afterwards and say perhaps you ought to attend an evening class on how to make better decisions. Maybe meet someone. So it's only the cinema you can rely on to dish out a proper good and ruthless steel-toed shit on your life. All you have to do's turn up with an hour's wage in one hand and the expectation of a pleasant time in the other. They'll take care of the rest. With encouragement, you can drag yourself so far through despair that you come out the other side of it onto a plane of devastating joy. A good way to do this is to put your head in the bin and weep on all the money. I've seen some people ask to be smashed in the stomach or the balls, but they are clearly new and will soon be tired of childish agony. The spine's where you want it. You'll think you don't, but they'll insist that you do. During its first week of release I was employed to see Dude, Where's My Car at least seven times in full. I know what I'm talking about. My managers were angry about my habit of reading books and eating hot dogs in the corridor, instead of sitting in the back row making sure everyone was satisfactorily traumatised. You're being paid for this, they said, and you act like thirteen hours a day might be slightly too much. We've given you a torch. Little did I know that one day I'd be paying my own money to experience tiny fractions of global torment, beginning with the Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man and continuing most recently with Looper. I want to go back to the cinema I used to work at and thank them. With my fists. But it went out of business in the first wave of the recession, and by now it'll've been turned into a Wetherspoon. There's no hope.

Substance Misuse and Tennis

Good god a new Job Centre. What a postcode we've acquired. Trees out the window. The hum of opportunity. Men in small cubicles screaming hopefully into phones. Being told to go to one floor, then another, then back to the original one, apologised to, adminned at and ejected. She was a fizzy whirlwind and had nice-smelling teeth. Appointment next week and everything. Didn't ask me what I was reading, disappointingly, because it's a large book and after saying its title I was going to say usually I read books that weigh less than my head and we were going to laugh like dolphins and slap our fucking thighs off. It's the little things. But no.

Ghoul Provided

We went to see some very clever men sit in a line and refer to themselves. An audience of seven hundred gained no knowledge and reassessed their priorities. After fifty minutes a microphone was thrown around and some cheap coats made daft noise while the very clever men attempted how-bloody-interesting faces before boldly responding to the questions that hadn't been asked. We had paid money and booked time off work and travelled hundreds of miles. It was a plan. Afterwards we drank dark things and ruminated. The sky had been cancelled and the river came up to your balls.

Bafflepig Surplus

We've started paying the TV Licence again. We don't watch it. We're the maverick idiot platoon. They haven't thanked us, they've just stopped threatening to fist us to death. They were sending two letters a day and they all said things like if you don't give us cash now then Graham Norton might have to start paying for his own snacks. Obviously the guilt became unbearable and every knock on the door caused nauseating premonitions. So it's worth it just for the relief. I have requested itemised bills so we can know where our money is going. We don't want it spent on anything twatty. But they have other incomes so I imagine it's hard to pinpoint exactly who's paying for what.

Now Snappy Sometime

Argos phoned for a catch-up. I'd purchased something and instead of it arriving when they said it'd arrive, what arrived was a voice, through a phone, saying there's been an error, and why not spend the rest of the week nailing yourself to someone who gives a fuck. So I did. Then I emailed to complain about the delayed arrival of the item and the tone of voice used to deliver the news of the delay, which I felt did not tickle my fancy nearly enough and sounded if anything delighted that I'd been catastrophically inconvenienced. So the reader of this email had picked up a big red phone to tell me how entertaining my whinge whinge bloody whinge had been, well done for writing most of it in lower case and would I perhaps accept a refund of the delivery charge and a tray of figs. I said I was embarrassed slightly, not expecting any kind of reply really, certainly not one so personal and after dinner. I wrote the email on a high horse in the library and was shooed out before I had a chance to remove all the bluster. So sorry about that, but I am still angry, but not at you personally, and did you say figs or fig rolls, because I find a fig on its own is not worth the effort. She said she'd check, and everything's alright, and she was also a fully-trained psychiatrist. Fully-trained, she said. Fully-trained? Yes, a fully-trained psychiatrist. It was Saturday night and I'd just found some lager in a bin. I told her I had absolutely no other problems at all, so all that fully training would be wasted on me. But can I tell you the story of the rug my housemate ordered and which right now my toes are enjoying, he ordered it from you, not you personally, last month, just by pressing the screen of his phone, and it arrived at exactly the time specified and was delivered by a vibrating man just happy to be alive. Touched the screen on his phone a few times, I said, and then made some coffee and chuckled for three quarters of an hour in his dressing gown, whereas I've had to use my legs to walk to the shop, fingers to find the item in the catalogue, voice and face to arrange delivery, buttons to transfer money, and still the only thing I've received is a knife in the arsehole. And she said well how about a ten pound voucher then, and I said yeah alright.

Eaten Anyway

I asked a window to give me some work. It said there were very many repetitive tasks available and asked what kind of thing was I looking for. I said I was looking to exchange my time and basic limb-manipulation skills for cash I can spend on things I won't remember.
Yes, it said, I have some work for you, tonight, in the Stuff Parade, you have to stand at the end of a tunnel while bits of stuff come at you and you decide whether that stuff is good stuff or bad stuff. Bad stuff goes to the left where the electric boffins furrow their brows at it until its purpose emerges. Good stuff meanwhile gets put in a shipping container which is then loaded onto a massive cackling boat and never heard from again.

Jumbo

Do you have the variety of prawn that I want that isn't any of the three varieties of prawn on your shelves? I want the big ones full of nice bits. I've forgotten where they're from. They're not the Thai ones that you have. I can taste the air miles. No I've never been. I hear it's full of sin and disease. Are you sure there's none in the stock room? Maybe you have them in a sort of backup pond? Maybe they're being delivered as we speak? I can't start dinner without them, the wife's hell-bent. As am I. Well if you don't have them I'll have to take the inferior ones. It won't be the same. We'll end up arguing and I'll say something about settling for second best. We'll be tense for days. It'll put me off my heron-slaying.

Much

Another year slides off the face and into the bin.
The bus ticket was one pound of money and fifty pence of despair more than I had imagined the upper limit could possibly be even in this new modern world we currently live in nowadays before I jogged to the bus and got on board. I regretted the jogging, and did an impression of the driver saying to me the number he'd just said, and before I'd finished he was saying yes, yes and looking at me like you're going to pay anyway, so just pay, I have to parade this robbery machine around the local area all week and say that price to people every day, and every day I discover that there isn't a way of saying it to someone who hasn't heard it that doesn't result in their doing an impression of me saying it to them but in a much more sarcastic voice than I had in fact said it.

The Kind Of Thing That Happens In Those Parts

The disco tree came back. Your standard Oak hulk, alone on a small hill, lit from the trunk to the tip of every branch by those electric rainbow-cables they have nowadays. Are they fibre-optic or just fancy fairy-lights? Wrapped tightly and plugged into I don't know what. That special outdoor electricity you get round Christmas.
We gathered, about thirty of us, cold and dancing, drinking from cans and bottles and a hip-flask was being passed around, and when you drank from it your face turned inside out. There were some drums and oil barrels and things to hit them with, and the people hit them and we moved while the lights on the tree pulsed purple and red. It looked like one of those fish that live in the earth's core. They know how to have a good time, those fish. Have you seen the series where Attenbrough goes through the centre of the earth? It's worth a look. Pretty soon everyone had texted everyone else and there were people all over the hill covered in light and a very tall cockney woman said fuck me that tree's going chicken oriental. The branches at the top were all shades of red and the thicker ones were going from white to blue and back again. It was like that scene in that film where there's a few people in a place and they all seem to be having a good time.
The fireworks started then. It must've been five to twelve, and our attention turned from the tree to the sky and the things bursting in it. Also, someone on the ground had fireworks, not very well-positioned, and occasionally they screamed past our heads. But no one seemd too bothered. Except the tree, which as you might know is the jealous and attention-seeking sort. Our heads were all turned away from it for about ten minutes, and when we started trying to get it going again, after the fireworks had gone from booming to popping, it had turned a solid shade of dark grey. Someone tried to hug it and slightly burnt their face on the lights.
There was a lull, then the very tall cockney woman said hang about, why don't we try turning it off and fucking on again?
But we couldn't find the switch. Or the plug, or any kind of power cable at all. And by that time we'd ran out of drink, so everyone walked down the hill to the pub for tequila.

Whoosh or something

Head office possibly exaggerates the wonders of power-kiting whilst on the phone selling the activities to schools. Most of the kids talk about it as if they're going to be strapped into a wheeled vehicle and yanked to Spain and back by a nylon Pteradactyl.
In reality, our Power Kiting is just Flying A Kite and eight times out of ten the wind is too strong or not strong enough. They should call it Beach Disappointment.
If the wind is right though, and the kites go in the air, you have to spend half your time making sure the kids don't slam the kite into Gerard Depardieu's collarbones and the other half untwisting the kite lines [never "strings"] after failed attempts to do so. Meanwhile the tide creeps up and the beach gets busy and the group gets restless because there's only two kites for usually about twenty kids.
Once, during no wind, we had a Beach Art Competition, and some of them drew a twenty-foot tall transgender robot called Roberta, and made the least tall kid sit in the middle where the genitals weren't and pose for photos. They won.