A Farewell To Arms

(well, only one of them, and even that's only au revoir, or at least I hope so)

Happy New Year, he lied.

I broke my bloody arm on January 7th, tripping over a tree-root growing out of a South London pavement. 'Pissed, I suppose' say all my friends sympathetically - the worst are those who don't say it with their mouths but with their eyes. As a matter of fact I was stone cold the-Leith-police-dismisseth-us sober, and on the way to, not from, the pub. The subsequent week has given rise to the following exhortation:

On the lookout for a diverting pastime to fill out the long winter evenings? Try this. First you take your good arm, the writing-or-wanking one, and encase it in half a ton of cement. This gives you a choice of holding it up, which will make your muscles feel as if you had been writing-or-wanking for twelve hours non-stop, or letting it hang down, which will swell your fingers up so that they look like black puddings inside five minutes. Then go about your daily activities, bearing in mind that though your w-or-w arm is no use to you whatever you can’t just pretend it isn’t there, as if you knock it against anything it will hurt like lubeless buggery. Start with a nice hot bath. You will, of course, have to leave one arm trailing out of the water and, instead of relaxing with a book and a cup of tea, will have a cruel choice between one and the other. And don’t fill the bath too full; lowering yourself gently into it is unlikely to work as smoothly as it does with a full complement of limbs, and the slightest misjudgement will catapult you into the starring role in the blockbuster movie Archimedes and the Indoor Tsunami. But you will enjoy your bath, at least until the moment you try to get out of it. This, you will find, is exponentially more difficult than getting in, and added zest is conferred by the high probability of slipping and breaking further limbs. Once you have mopped up the bathroom the next delight awaits: getting dressed. Socks are a particular challenge. Then, unless you have a number of loose Chinese silk jackets hanging around the wardrobe, you may find you haven’t a shirt whose sleeve you can get your prosthesis into. Didn’t think of that last time you passed the Chinese silk jacket shop, did you? I should have mentioned that this experiment needs to be made in Northern Europe in January, so you can’t cheat by wearing short sleeves.

Then, of course, a guy’s gotta eat. Cooking presents any number of insuperable obstacles, so you head over to the supermarket to get some gloop in a tin. Problem solved, you will think, or you will if you’ve never tried opening a tin one-handed. Award yourself 5 points for everything you knock over and spill while arranging and consuming your nutrients. When you reach 100, and you will, allow yourself a big drink – you’ll need it. And so the long day wears on, revealing a million unexpected new lights on why God in His wisdom equipped us with two hands.

And some special extras too. For example, it will itch like buggery under your cast every so often, and the only think you can poke under there to scratch it is a Japanese chopstick. Note italics: the Chinese ones will not do because they are too thick at the business end whereas the implements of Nippon taper off to a point. The other alternative is a knitting needle, but the average (grannyless) home these days is less likely to possess a knitting needle than a Japanese chopstick. Otherwise you will have to take pot luck among the kitchen utensils; but if anyone is observing you, you may need to be prepared to convince them that you are not in fact slitting your wrists in the old Roman way, much though you may feel like doing so by this point.

Do gay people ever get done for drink-driving? I can’t remember ever hearing of one. It seems to me an exclusively heterosexual offence, caused mainly by marriage. Most sensible men are careful not to drink if they know in advance that they’ll be driving later, but married men are constantly being bugged to pick someone up or ferry someone hither and thither on the spur of the moment. And refusing a wifely request is not thinkable, particularly if you have compounded your sins by being pissed. Hell hath no fury like a woman mildly inconvenienced.

I just throw this in as an objective observation, of course; not that I’d ever think of drink-driving myself. It’s not as if I scraped the gate-post at midnight last night on the way to pick up ‘er indoors from a really not terribly distant Underground station, or anything. She says that when she rang me to ask for a pick-up she didn’t realise I’d be drunk. We’ve been together for four years, during which period the number of times I’ve been sober at midnight can be counted on the fingers of a pissed blind carpenter’s hand.

Talking balls

Everyone knows, and rightly applauds, Martin Luther King’s famous speech about his dream that one day people would not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. But we don’t appear to have listened through to the end of the sentence. To judge anyone by the evident content of his character is today unthinkable. All sorts of horrible deeds are perpetrated by scowling street criminals, knighted City fraudsters, enthusiasts for the “dignity and honour” of the KGB and suchlike, but nowhere do you hear anyone on a public platform and declare simply “X is a scumbag”. (With relentless irony, this is particularly true if the colour of X’s skin should chance to be other than white.) In a world awash with scumbags, the only really unacceptable thing is to call the phenomenon by its name.

Everyone has their “bete noire” words, words which affect one like a fingernail dragged across brickwork, and I have just used mine, albeit ironically. It is “unacceptable”. It is used all the time by querulous whingers, and seems to mean “something which I don’t like and will sound off about pompously, and then carry on accepting so that I can sound off some more”. If something is not acceptable you don’t accept it. I got sick of people maundering on about the state of London’s transport infrastructure being unacceptable, although I agreed with them. But I emigrated, and they didn’t.

In these over-sensitive times, almost every condition which might once have been thought unfortunate has its euphemism; “differently abled”, “challenged”, “mobility-impaired” etc. With one exception. No-one, as far as I can see, has ever tried to put a prettifying gloss on the condition of poverty; to imply, as most of the other euphemisms do, that the state has something to recommend it. I have yet to hear a politician or journalist speak of the “differently financed”, and am not holding my breath.

Pounding the dusty roads of Schleswig-Holstein this afternoon - well, not exactly the full Woody Guthrie, he didn't have a nippy little Saab to do the pounding in - in search of an old-fashioned record player. I bought one on e-bay, and went to pick it up for the second time in 24 hours, having screwed up first time and failed to find the place. The guy has an enormous warehouse full of all kinds of tat, and is running a business based on buying and selling all the crap one finds lying about the house - and I've just moved, so I know what I'm talking about here. Strange interface between the virtual and the actual world; in so many areas the information superhighway can only lay the groundwork for moving actual objects around the surface of the earth. The banana I have for breakfast has to be picked in South America and brought to Hamburg on a bloody great container ship, and until we can eat e-mails or e-mail bananas, ever more shall be so.

Once more pondering the problem of nasty and unpleasant people. Not why they so often flourish while good men languish - sorted out that one, with the help of the Book of Job. No; just what they see in it in the first place. Obviously there are a few short-term gains to be made from being a complete arsehole; but surely any intelligent person ought to be able to see through the other side of that. As has been rightly said, the problem with the rat race is that even if you win it you're still a rat. Perhaps the nasties feel there is a sort of Kantian categorical imperative in it; if only everybody would behave like a total git, the problems of the world would instantly evaporate. Can't see it somehow.

Presumably, even if the bit about evil people burning in Hell is just a metaphor, it's got to be a metaphor for something. Meanwhile the wayward neurons have ambled off in a Blakean direction:

He who shall prove himself a Turd
At Judgment-Seat shall ne’er be heard.

A long and yellow Streak of Piss
Shall never taste Eternal Bliss.

A Silly Bugger or Fuckwit
The Last Dread Judge shall ne’er acquit.

Be not an Arse or Bollock-Brain,
For Retribution comes amain.

Well! Never again will I have to turn up in anyone's blasted office at 8.30 on a Monday morning. The epiphany of early retirement. I'm trying to put together a pastiche of Larkin's "Toads Revisited" to make exactly the opposite point to his - work is not necessary as a prop or an affirmation, it's just a nasty thing and, as such, nastier than nice things. I remember a conversation with three colleagues early in my sentence on the inevitable subject of "what would you do if you suddenly won a couple of million in the lottery?" I was utterly flabbergasted to find myself the only one who would jack in the nine to five (or the seven-eleven, as is more usual these days). "But what would you do all day?" Well, now I'm finding out, and although it isn't edifying I stick to my guns. I've got plenty to do, although I don't always do it. The real question is how, when confronted by the pointless vexation and human malice inseparable from any workplace, one would answer the question "Why the sodding hell di I put up with this?" whe one can no longer fall back on "because I've got bills to pay and a family to feed". If I won the lottery on Saturday and went back into work on Monday morning, I'd reach sod-this-for-a-lark point by Tuesday afternoon at the very latest.

Very sadly, it seems that poisoned Russian defector Sasha Litvinenko has now died. It's no use saying that this sort of thing can't go on, because it clearly has and will continue to do so. The organisation that blew up three hundred people in Moscow in 1999 in order to get the Chechen war going again isn't going to balk at a little thing like this. The only thing to do now is to assassinate Putin. It's the only thing his accursed organisation will take any notice of. Wipe the bastard off the face of the earth next time he shows up in any civilised place.