“Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole”
- The Modern Lovers

Last Thursday evening we were driving home from Wales. Clare was sitting beside me and the kids had fallen asleep on the back seat. The two grown-ups were about to have a proper grown-up conversation when a jet black Citroën Xsara Picasso overtook us somewhat aggressively. The grown-up conversation was put on hold. “The Citroën Picasso,” I snarled with mild indignation. “What do you think old Pablo would have made of that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Clare. “Why don’t you tell me. I can see you’re itching to.”

So I did:

“I think he would have hated it. I mean, there he is: this major big-ass icon of the 20th Century, a bona fide cultural heavyweight who revolutionised art and transformed the way in which we see the world. People like that don’t want to end up becoming synonymous with a safe and sensible family car. It’s bad for the image. If you ask me, I think he’d be pretty damned furious that his descendants were so willing to whore his name off so indiscriminately.”

“Really?” said Clare, somewhat dryly. “I bet they didn’t get a penny.”

“Really?” said I, somewhat dimly. “That makes it worse. At least, I think that makes it worse.”

There was a moment’s silence as I gathered my thoughts and watched the red tail lights of the popular MPV fade into the distance.

“It’s all about design principles,” I continued. “If you’re going to name a car after someone like Picasso then at least try to remain faithful to your source of inspiration. A proper Citroën Picasso wouldn’t look anything like that. For one thing, there’d be none of those functionally streamlined elegant curves. The real deal would be cube-like, wilfully asymmetrical and feature oblique references to the Spanish Civil War. Plus, all the wheels would be different sizes.”

“It’d be a bugger to drive,” said Clare. “You struggle with parallel parking at the best of times.”

I was now in full-on monologue mode, so I managed to deftly side-step my partner’s sarcasm: “Why stop with Picasso?” I said. “I want to see a range of family-friendly, design classic MPVs inspired by the greatest artists of the 20th Century. Just imagine a Citroën Dalí! A vulgar egg-shaped monstrosity with a massive pair of waxed windscreen wipers, a melting speedo and a Sat Nav that refers to itself in the third person.”

“Or a Citroën Pollock,” said Clare.

“What’s that like?” I asked.

“It’s like a Citroën Picasso that’s been in an accident.”

We spent yesterday in Wales visiting my old friends Jude & Jonathan at their secluded lakeside retreat located somewhere between Llanidloes and God Knows Where (Dduw Chnotiau Ble). I introduced my old friends to my new family and, for the second time in my life, tried to water ski. It was not a dignified sight.

The journey involved us driving up some ridiculously steep inclines, negotiating some svelte-like country lanes and indulging in the kind of hairy off-road antics that my modest Citroen Saxo is not best equipped for. The Saxo might be fine as an urban runabout, but last time I checked ‘driving through a field filled with sheep’ wasn’t one of its unique selling points.

(It’s sitting outside the house now, looking slightly forlorn and covered in a generous coating of babyshit-brown mud. My neighbours must think I’ve taken up rally driving.)

In any case, as we approached our destination we saw a rather disturbing sight. Next to a particularly treacherous bend on a particularly skinny stretch of a particularly vertigo-inducing country lane sat the corpse of a white Vauxhall Corsa. It was smashed to smithereens and looked as though it had been sitting there for quite some time. The most disturbing thing about it, though, was that it was covered in graffiti. Scrawled all over the car in black spray paint was the following sinister message:

HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA HA ha HA HA Ha HA

Maybe it was because I watched too many horror films at an impressionable age, but I couldn’t help but feel ill at ease. Was this an omen of some kind? Should we turn back? Had we stumbled into some weird, Deliverance-style pocket of wrong?

As it happened, the day passed without incident. I can only assume that the white Corsa festooned in HAs was some kind of weird tribute to the late Heath Ledger.

When I was a student at Hull University, lo those many years ago, I was involved in a cruel and unusual April Fools prank that I still feel rather guilty about now.

It wasn’t my idea, you understand. I could never have dreamt up anything that reeked of so much wrong. I didn’t have much to do with the prank’s execution, either. I just grabbed a seat at ringside, kept my mouth shut, my face straight and watched it all unfold.

The target was my very dear friend, Jude, who was (and still is) one of the loveliest and most genuine people I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet. Unfortunately for Jude, however, she used to be (but isn’t any more) a tad gullible. This loophole in her personality profile was something her trusted circle of friends were not averse to exploiting.

It was 1993, I guess, and a bunch of us were sitting in the living room of the house that Jude shared with our mutual friends Jo and Rick. We were all watching daytime TV when the telephone rang and – as planned – the rest of us feigned laziness so Jude would have to pick it up.

On the other end of the line a man claiming to be an engineer from the phone company told Jude that emergency work was currently being carried out on the local exchange. Her telephone line would be out of order for the next hour and, as a result, she would not be able to make or receive any phone calls. If her phone were to ring during the next hour then this will be caused by the engineering works and she should not – under any circumstances whatsoever – answer it. He was quite emphatic about that.

Over the next hour, the phone rang on several occasions and, on each occasion, Jude refused to answer it. Then, almost an hour after the engineer spoke to her, it rang again.

“Is it an hour yet?” asked Jude.

“Yes,” we said. “It’s more than an hour since you spoke to him. Answer the phone.”

It was still ringing. “I’d better not answer it yet,” said Jude. “It might be dangerous.”

“Yes you should. It could be urgent. Answer the phone.”

It was still ringing. Slowly, reluctantly, she reached for the blower and – at the very instant it left its cradle – a terrible, blood-curdling scream erupted from the receiver.

We could all hear it.

Panicking, she pressed the blower to her ear and heard a second voice yell: “”Blakey! Oh my God! You killled Blakey!” Jude slammed the blower into its cradle and looked at us in terror.

“I think I’ve killed someone,” she sobbed.

And, for about half an hour, that’s just what we let her believe. Until, that is, our friends who made the phone call arrived at the house and admitted to everything…

We arrived back home from Hull the other week safe and sound and ever-so-slightly knackered. Or at least I was. Knackered, that is. Clare, Lily and Optimus were just safe and sound. As I mentioned previously, we went to Hull to collect a pram that can change into a pushchair and that’s why we call it Optimus Pram. Or, at least, that’s why I do.

I was a student at Hull University between 1990-1993, so returning to my old stomping ground for the first time in a long time was always going to be weird. Over the years I’ve carefully maintained a massive stockpile of rose-tinted recollections associated with the place. I suppose that’s something that most people who went to college do, with the possible exception of graduates from Sarajevo Poly.

Still, Hull was where I met some of my closest and most trusted friends. In that respect I’ll always have a lot to thank it for. During those three years there were good times, bad times and some extremely batshit crazy times. This was, after all, the place where I was interviewed on a local radio news programme after fleeing for my life from an exploding aerosol factory. It was where I spent every Sunday afternoon at a workingman’s club that offered a regular line-up of bingo, live yodelling and striptease. It was where I shared a house with three friends and a 6-foot tall mechanical bear. It’s a place that’s hard-wired into my history and has helped make me the person I am today. In that respect, then, it probably has a lot to answer for.

As Clare, Lily and I approached Hull the other week and I caught my first, still-breathtaking glimpse of that ridiculously long suspension bridge spanning the Humber Estuary, I found myself thinking of all those other times I did this journey, back when my Dad did the driving and I just struggled with directions. My dad passed away in 1995, and now – years later – it was my turn to be the responsible adult sitting behind the wheel. I mused on the way that life has a funny way of throwing up such ironies, until I remembered that I still struggle with directions.

After picking up the pram from Hessle, we made our way towards the city centre. As I’d expected, things had changed in the way that things invariably do. Having lived in Birmingham for most of my life I know that modern British city centres are more than a wee bit partial to extensive plaster surgery. Hull, it seems, was no exception. The change in the retail landscape was the first thing I noticed: the Jacksons chain of regional supermarkets had all turned into Sainsbury’s Locals, the Armadillo comic shop was now a coffee shop and the sight of the massive new St Stephen’s Shopping Centre (next to the revamped Paragon railway station) caused my eyes to do a reasonable impersonation of Marty Feldman’s. Hull’s been hit hard by High Street homogenisation, I alliterated wistfully to myself.

This feeling swiftly passed as we swiftly passed the neighbouring LA’s nightclub. From the outside, at least, it looked exactly the same as I remembered it from 18 years’ ago. This was quite an achievement, as back then it looked rather dated.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” as they say in South Yorkshire.

It’s embarrassing to admit this, but we’re into the third week of January and I still haven’t cobbled together one of those obligatory end-of-the-year lists for 2008. I can’t begin to explain how bad this makes me feel.

These lists have become such a staple of the blogosphere that each and every one of us feels obliged to complete one each and every year. You know the sort of thing: My Top 10 Albums of 2008, My Top 10 Films of 2008, My Top 10 Bloody Top 10s of 2008… each one a highly subjective attempt to reduce the year’s cultural and artistic highlights into an ascending or descending sequence of chart positions. It is a dull, arduous and thankless task that we’re forced to do on an annual basis. To put it another way, it’s the blogging equivalent of completing a tax return.

According to some sources, the first year-end Top 10 blog post appeared as far back as 1995, when blogging pioneer Zeppo Connery posted his groundbreaking Top 10 of Dodgy Flash Animation Shorts on a CompuServe bulletin board. This was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of all because his list was actually compiled prior to the launch of Macromedia Flash and the subsequent wave of late-90s dodgy Flash animation shorts.

Of course, year-end Top 10 lists were in existence long before the advent of blogs and even the Internet. Newspapers and magazines have used them for many decades as a means of filling column inches while staffers spend Christmas with their families. Even the music industry has been known to utilise a similar methodology, regularly using ‘Top 10s’ to track the sales of records over a given period.

According to some sources, however, this tradition of compiling year-end Top 10 list dates back to ancient times. Recent discoveries about the the Mayan Civilisation of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica suggest that their people were decatheistic, that is, while a veritable plethora of Gods and Goddesses were available for worship, only ten of them were ever taken seriously at any one time. This ‘Top 10′ was updated annually, but since the Mayan year was considerably longer than the Gregorian year the process was a lot less bothersome.

This phenomena also seems to have a precedent in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The recent discovery of an apocryphal biblical text suggests that the Ten Commandments, previously believed to be delivered on stone tablets on Mount Sinai, were actually updated on an annual basis:

“And the Lord said unto Moses: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife and neither shall thou covet thy neighbour’s house, thy neighbour’s ox or thy neighbour’s chart position. And thou shalt not kill shalt be a new entry at number 9, whilst thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour shalt still be a non-mover at number 8.”

Of course, to the modern-day blogger, none of this offers any reassurance. Any failure to reduce the year’s artistic and cultural highlights to a sequence of highly subjective chart entries can result in dire consequences. If you don’t knock out a Top 10 Albums, Top 10 Films or even a bloody Top 10 Top 10s of 2008 you can lose your licence, be exiled from the blogosphere or even find yourself stripped of your hard-earned Technorati points.

I’d better get my finger out, then.

Lils has joined an after-school golf club at her infant school where she and her five year old pals will soon be learning the arcane arts of pitching, putting and wearing a Pringle v-neck. She’s tremendously excited about it.

Lils was talking to Clare and me about this, and I said, quite innocently: “Wow, Lils – at the age of five you’re learning to do something that I’ve spent thirty-eight years trying to avoid.”

“What’s that?” said Lils. “Work?”

The line was delivered with precision comic timing. I was never that good.

So here we are, at the start of a bright new year; and here I am, thumping the keyboard like a sausage-fingered caveman, trying to hammer out my first blog post of 2009. It’s also my first blog post in almost a month, but who’s keeping track of these things, anyhow?

Something odd has recently occurred to me. Actually, it’s occurred to me at regular intervals over the last eight or nine years, but now’s as good a time as any to share it with others. That’s probably not the best thing to do when something odd occurs to you, especially in the wee small hours of the morning, but at least this way I get to find out whether it’s occurred to others, too. It may even may have occurred to you, in which case we could always pool our resources, split the counselling fees or form a Facebook group.

Anyhow, the oddity that’s occurred to me is this: if, like me, your calendar of choice is the Gregorian calendar then you’ll probably agree that we’re fast approaching the end of the first decade of the 21st Century. Sure, depending on how much of a stickler or a party-pooper you were ten years’ ago, you may have argued over whether the 21st Century kicked off in the year 2000 or 2001. You’ll probably now agree, however, that we’re fast approaching the Kubrick decade’s closing overs and final furlongs. Isn’t it odd, then – in this Year of Our Lord two thousand and nine – we’ve yet to agree on what this decade is actually called?

It was all so straightforward in the 20th Century. There was the Nineties, and before that, the Eighties. Prior to that we had the Seventies, Sixties, Fifties and so on. They were parcels of time, each conjuring up a specific cocktail of imagery and music and history and style. They were arbitrary labels, based on a highly capricious measurement of time that was steeped in Medieval folklore and riddled with sweeping inaccuracies and generalisations.

But at least they had names.

And these weren’t names that were applied after the event. It wasn’t like the way the French Revolution that became known as the French Revolution long after the Storming of the Bastille. People thought of the Nineties as the Nineties during the Nineties, and it was the same for all the other 20th Century decades. At the end of the 90s, for instance, certain musical fads could be described by media pundits as “early-90s” just as, at the end of the 80s, shoulder pads and designer stubble could be described by the fashionistas and those-what-give-a-shit as “very mid-80s.”

So far as I can tell, however, we haven’t settled on a name for this decade we’re living in right now. I’ve heard a few attempts, mind you. “The Noughties” pops up now and then, but to me that sounds a bit too FHM for my tastes. “The Zeroes” is another one I’ve heard on occasion, but that not only contains unfortunate pessimistic conotations, but it also sounds like it should be an indie band (and a quick Google search confirms my suspicions…). For the most part, though, journalists, pundits and proper ordinary people seem to skirt around this issue like its a big temporal elephant in the room.

But I don’t this to turn into one of those rants by middle aged bloggers who moan about what’s wrong with things without offering any alternatives. At least not with this post. In the interests of bringing something to the table and opening up a debate on the subject here’s my suggestion for a name tag for this decade: “The Norts”. It’s catchy, and it’s free of the aforementiontioned connotations and the fact it will resonate with fans of the character Rogue Trooper from the great British comic 2000ad is an added bonus.

Of course, these labels are all based on the Gregorian calendar, which has always been my calendar of choice (from my experience, most people don’t realise there’s more than one calendar to choose from). If your calendar of choice isn’t the Gregorian calendar then it probably isn’t the first decade of the 20th Century for you. According to the nifty calendar converter I found here, today – 3rd January, 2009 – is:

7 Teveth 5769 according to the Hebrew Calendar
6 Muharram 1430 according to the Islamic Calendar
15 Kankin or 12.19.15.17.12 according to the Mayan calendar
Duodi, 12 Nivôse 217 according to the French Republican Calendar

And my favourite:

Pungenday, Chaos 3, Year of Our Lady of Discord 3174 according to the Discordian calendar.

Maybe I should think about switching brands.

I’m perversely tempted to take part in the indefatigable Jon (Birmingham: It’s Not Shit) Bounds’ demented-yet-delightful bus-based social experiment, 11-11-11:

On the 11th of November let’s create a modern ritual, a post-millennial cultural cult.

Eleven hours on the eleven bus — join us.

The rules:

• Get on the 11C at 11am (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
• Get off the 11C at 10pm — 11 hours later — (or as near as dammit) on 11/11.
• You can get on and off the bus as many times as you like (don’t spend more than an hour off bus).
• Document your journey; photos, film, writing, cross-stitch, knitting, amigurumi, poetry, blog, twitter, however you like.
• Meet up with others as mad as you, if you want.

I’m up for a bit of that. I quite like the idea of donating some bandwidth-by-proxy to such a bold, civic-minded endeavour, particularly when it’s a public transport-based collective metamedia travelogue. It’d make me feel like a walking, talking, head-on collision between Bill Bryson, Marshall McLuhan and, perhaps, Reg Varney.

More importantly, though, it’d give me plenty of potentially juicy things to write about on here. Not only is the Number 11 the longest urban bus route in Europe, but every time I’ve been on it I’ve witnessed something odd, weird or mad as a bungee-jumping bishop in a ballgown. They don’t call it an “Out-Patient Ward on Wheels” for nothing.

All this talk of buses reminds me of several things.

For the sake of clarity, brevity and sanity, however, I’ll narrow it down to one. Long ago and far away (which, by my calendar, makes it approximately August 1996) I witnessed a Hofstadter Strange Loop in action on the Number 45. Being a part-time philosopher and half-arsed science geek – which I define as someone who read about CERN and the Large Hadron Collider before Dan Brown wrote about it in Angels and Demons (which, of course, I don’t plan to read) – I had a basic grasp what a Hofstadter Strange Loop was. For the sake of clarity, brevity and charity, however, I’ll just say that a Hofstadter Strange Loop is a sort of elaborate definition of a paradox. You can find a proper definition on Wikipedia, but for me its best summed up by the art of MC Escher or that memorable line from the 80s video classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension:

“Wherever you go, there you are…”

Indeed. Anyway, while I had a reasonably firm grasp of what a Hofstadter Strange Loop was, I never knew what one looked like. I certainly didn’t expect it to resemble a grumpy old fart with a tartan shopping trolley.

Cut to: one sunny Saturday afternoon in 1996. There I was, sitting on the lower deck of a number 45, heading home from somewhere I can’t remember and reading a book I can’t recall when the bus got itself stuck in a traffic jam along the Pershore Road. It was a particularly vicious and stubbornly viscous strain of traffic jam, even by the standards of the Pershore Road. I didn’t mind, though: it was a pretty good book.

Sitting in front of me was a grumpy old man with a Tartan shopping trolley who spoke in a Birmingham accent that was so strong that you could be forgiven for thinking it was a bad parody of a Birmingham accent. I couldn’t be forgiven for thinking this, of course, as I’ve written so many bad parodies over the years’ that I wouldn’t get away with it. A fairer description would be to say that the old man spoke in that rarest strain of the Brummie accent, the raw, unrefined, undiluted Brummie accent that these days only exists amongst scattered pockets of traditionalists and in certain parts of the BBC Radio WM schedule.

As the traffic jam slowly eased its way into a terminal case of entropic paralysis, the man and his trolley huffed, puffed and fumed with increasing bile and volume. I tried to ignore them, but it wasn’t easy. These things rarely are.

Eventually he stood up and marched over to the bus driver: “Ooroyt, mucka – what’s gooin’on with the traffic, then?” he asked. “It’s a bloody disgrace, that’s what it is – a bloody disgrace!”

The driver explained that some Reclaim the Streets protesters were exercising their democratic right to park their derrieres on the tarmac up ahead.

The old man seemed to explode with rage. Innocent bystanders were maimed by shards of herbal cough drops. The shopping trolley spewed its contents out in sympathy. “Bloody protesters?” he roared, “bloody protesters? You mean to say we’re stuck here on accounta bunch a BLOODY PROTESTERS?” He was disgusted. He was outraged. He was possibly vitriolic with fury. You could feel his vile, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

“I’m sick of these bloody bastard protesters”, he continued, now addressing the entire lower deck of the bus. “Bunch of arf-soaked, scruffy, workshy bastards with nothing better to do, the lot of ‘em. If they’re not out saving the whale or banning the bomb or getting there knickers in a twist they’re holding things up for the rest of us.”

“That sort of thing should be against the law,” he said. “People shouldn’t be allowed to protest.”

I looked up from my book, but decided to say nothing.

I was sitting at my desk today, doing some work and trying to mind my own business. Some colleagues sitting across from me were talking about Roman roads. I don’t know why, they just were.

Against my better judgement, I decided to elbow my way into their conversation: “Is that Roman roads you’re talking about?” I asked, rhetorically. “Do you know that substantial parts of one of Birmingham’s major ‘A’ roads – the A38 – follow the course of a famous Roman road? Between Worcester and Birmingham – and again between Lichfield and Derby – the A38 follows a route built by Roman invaders over two thousand years ago.”

There was a pause. I did that to prime them for the punchline:

“Of course, back in those days the Romans didn’t call it the A38. They called it the A XXXVIII.”

The sudden outbreak of silence distracted everyone.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m into neologisms in a big way. When I get bored, I make up new words. I got bored this week, so I made up a new word. If you want it you can have it.

VEXICON (vek-sə-kän), noun,

A collection of words, phrases and expressions that I find deeply annoying.