The nicest juvenile delinquents in the world

I had a real Mark Corrigan (sorry about the ads) experience last night.

As I walked through the Monkmoor estate in Shreswbury, wearing my warm old-man's clothes and dragging my fencing bag behind me, I met a group of kids, who must have ranged from 8 to 12 years old. 'Oh no', I thought to myself. 'I've seen this episode. They ask menacing questions then call me a paedo and kick me up the bottom. Then I lock myself indoors and resign myself to a lifetime of bitter hate and fear'.

Sure enough, they gathered round me shouting something. I remove my earphones (Philip Glass's Heroes symphony). They're not calling me a paedo or laughing at my garb. They're asking if they can throw snowballs at me. I'm so stunned that I find I can only reward their good manners by acquiescing. 'Sure', I tell them. 'But not the face'. They keep their side of the bargain, and we all walk away happy, and reassured that society hasn't yet descended into barbarism.

Here's another similar experience from the sublime Attila the Stockbroker.

Quite enough for one day

I'm off. Food, then Isy Suttie's doing stand-up tonight. She was Dobby in Peep Show. I'm only going because my chum Phil, who books the acts, thinks it would be hilarious to have a photo of me taken with her. Because I allegedly look like Mark Corrigan. Humph.

"Maybe nobody minds about things as much as me."

Update, August 2010: Hello to my repeat visitor from Grosse Pointe, Michigan (great film, by the way). Glad you can't stay away. Do they have Peep Show in the US? Leave a comment, tell us why you keep coming back!

Friends, colleagues and drunken strangers on trains and in the street have repeatedly remarked upon my resemblance to Mr. David Mitchell, the ubiquitous comedian with whom I share a birthday, a tailor, and every single opinion.

My friends will also be familiar with my antipathy towards hairstyling. Haircuts = fine. Hairstyles = needless complication (though I am being educated in this matter).

In this fine video, Mitchell lays off the cultural implication of hairstyles, but summarises my feelings about going to the barber with considerable wit.

I've never accepted the offer of a wash in the salon. I wash my hair before going. It seems polite.

Selected Peep Show quotations which remind me of me:


Peep Show is a comedy about an uptight loser and a lazy selfish loser. It's photographed from 'behind the eyes' of the characters, and the dialogue in brackets is their internal monologue.

Jez: You're a posh spaz.

Mark: Oh really? Well I'd love to know in what way I am a posh spaz.

Jez: In the way that you do posh, spazzy things like... tidying up and... ironing your socks.

Mark: I do not iron my socks!

Jez: Socks, shirts, whatever!

TV: I'm basically looking to meet someone like myself.

Mark: (Pfftt. That's exactly the opposite of what I'm looking for.)

Mark: [Before having toast for breakfast] (Brown for first course, white for pudding. Brown is savoury, white's the treat. Of course I'm the one who's laughing because I actually love brown toast.

Mark: (Well that was a fucking disaster. I want compensation. I want reparations. I want the Rhineland. It's going to be 1919 all over again, fuck the inevitable backlash.)

Mark: This is the sort of thing people do when they're having a good time.

Mark: Dancing? Y-yes... dancing... I love... dancing... (It makes me look like a coma victim being stood up and zapped with a cattle prod.)

Mark: (Sure, an orgy sounds great, but you're basically just multiplying the number of people you're not going to be able to look in the eye afterwards.)

Mark: I'm dangerously close to getting what I want. Feels a bit weird.

Jez: You're still living in your Hitchhiker's Guide world where you'll go around in your bathrobe and have a nice cup of tea.

Mark: (Look at me; I've got a girlfriend. A proper girlfriend reading a best-seller about child-abuse. I go out and have croissant. I'm just a normal functioning member of the human race and there's no way anyone can prove otherwise.)

Mark: Nothing means anything to you, does it? Friendship, loyalty - they're just fusty old words like sixpence and codpiece to you, aren't they?

Mark: She’s good for me, Jez, She’s dragging me into the twenty-first century with its meaningless logos and ironic veneration of tyrants. It’s all good, my friend.

[about Jez and Sophie being nice to Mark after he walked in on them almost having sex]

Mark: (Why are they being so nice? Maybe they've had a big chat about me and they're suddenly realised I was right about North Korea, I was right about the European Constitution, and by God I think I'm right about the congestion charge!)

Mark: (Look at them all - the Christians. It's not fair. I could be that happy if I believed in a lot of rubbish.)

Mark: Why does everything have to be fun to be worthwhile? Crick and Watson have discovered the double helix. Did they do it on a skateboard? No? Well fuck off then, I'm not interested.

Mark: The absolute worst thing anyone could say about you is that you were a selfish, moral blank, whose lazy cynicism and sneering, ironic take on the world encapsulates everything wrong with a generation. But you my friend are not evil.

"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself, sinking low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."

I am forsaking you, leaving you to wander the streets clutching bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 (great website, by the way), staring with mute desperation at passers-by, imploring them to pretend to be Plashing Vole for just a few seconds.

In other words, I'm having a long weekend, returning to my keyboard on Tuesday afternoon, probably.

Which means you'll be needing a Friday conundrum to keep you going.

What snippets of high or popular culture summarise your understanding of the world?

There are so many for me. I loved Marvin the Paranoid Android's observation that 'the dew has fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning', and the talkshow host's claim on The Simpsons that 'your tears say more than real evidence ever could'. Arthur Dent is quite a hero, and I'm just not getting into the Peep Show debate. Chris Morris has a peculiarly accurate though misanthropic approach to life.

Arthur Dent (from Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series:

I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle. As soon as I reach some kind of definite policy about what is my kind of music and my kind of restaurant and my kind of overdraft, people start blowing up my kind of planet and throwing me out of their kind of spaceships!

"This Arthur Dent," comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

Marvin:

Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my only companions. And vast intelligence, of course. And infinite sorrow.

Why stop now just when I'm hating it?

Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it.

Douglas Adams:

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

George Eliot:

The world outside the books is not a happy one, Maggie felt (from The Mill on the Floss).

Meanwhile, here are a few lines from Iain Sinclair's Downriver, just because I like them:

A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk and Kish. You were obliged to super-impose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs.

It's a great book - much more wordy, as you can see from this excerpt, than my usual taste, but it's got breadth of imagination and a real nasty swipe at the wideboys, bankers, property developers and all that crew who happily demolished old London to build poxy designer flats for yuppies. It's therefore a very good book to be reading in the midst of our current situation.

Staring horror-struck into the celebrity mirror

I've now had time to review the David Mitchell interview you all kindly pointed out. The results are frightening. He's both creepy and absolutely right about everything. As am I.

We share a birthdate, background, opinions and quietly devastating good looks. Ahem.

Oh, and this in common:

One major change even Mitchell can't have avoided must have been his new attractiveness to the opposite sex. For one thing, he has undergone a quite dramatic, A-list-style weight loss

This Friday's conundrum

A nice one this week.

Who are your fictional heroes? With whom do you identify or admire? I'm opting for Arthur Dent ('I seem to be having trouble with my lifestyle'), who fruitlessly and accidentally travelled the universe in search of a decent cup of tea, which is disastrous. He also sported a fine dressing gown, as I have been known to, loved cricket and was pretty decent.

I've been accused of resembling Mark Corrigan too. It's true that he (and David Mitchell) is right about most things, worries about ordinary human decency, comes from Shropshire, wears a good dressing gown and the actor shares a birthday with me, but I'm ignoring all that. (Some people say Mark's conservative - they're wrong. He's just not a liberal). My university ID card has a photo of Mark on it. Nobody has ever challenged me.

(Today's xkcd cartoon is a lovely typography one - don't miss the mouse-over. Did you know I went to watch a film about Helvetica and own several books on fonts?).

Open wide

I went to the dentist today, slightly grumpily because Chris Layne is a great, charming and kind man who is leaving the NHS system - the 5th biggest economy in the world can't organise a dental health service. However, I cheered up: my gnashers are OK (appearances can be deceptive) and Chris's wife Helen didn't recognise me because I've lost so much weight - wonderful. People have largely stopped shouting Peep Show phrases at me too…

Also, my iPod chose 3 Snowpony (they're better than the review linked to suggests) tracks from the first 4 it shuffled today. I'm a sucker for side-projects anyway (this lot are related to Stereolab and a load of other interesting bands, and it took me back to a lost age of non-Britpop indie, in which intelligent women wrote and played songs which didn't fake a commercial version of feminism, but dealt with social and political issues through the medium of ancient synths and Fender Jazz Basses (retro-futurism?) - crunchy, funky stuff.

Flowerface - an apology

OK, I take it back and I was just being paranoid. My friends say I'm paranoid - they say it behind my back and they're not really friends, they're aliens hired to make me insecure. They're good at it too.