PHAUDE.com

Interested readers may wonder (Ha! There’s the conceited introduction of an arrogant optimist if ever there was one) about the disparity between the date of publication of the previous post and the reference to Radio 4 schedules of some weeks ago. (Really? You actually think that? Seriously? How interested can anyone be? You’re not even that interested yourself, you great baboon. It’s just lazy, lazy writing and I won’t stand for it. (Yeah, well so’s interjecting in parentheses to argue with yourself, you wanker. “Ooh look at me, I’m moaning tediously while pretending to find offence in that same tedious moan like a deconstructivist comedian, yet at the same time am still moaning. Tediously. Falalalala, I’m so self-aware. I’ve seen Stewart Lee do stand-up so I think this is a clever way to behave, falalalala.”) Don’t try to outsmart me, sunshine. You just remember who you’re dealing with here.) The answer is BT, the artist formerly known as British Telecommunications Plc. (Oh, for Gawd’s sake. I’ve had enough of this.) Why, oh why, oh why (I mean it: stop it) can’t they ever bloody manage to connect your phone and broadband when you move home (I’m getting the chloroform) without making you wait for weeks on end (I’m warning you: this is your last chance) for a service they routinely provi-mmmfffff…

INTERLUDE

A nondescript South London corner shop, the type you see on every street. By which, of course, I mean one that wasn’t actually on a corner at all. In the aisle next to mine, a grandmother, mother and daughter. Or do I mean two mothers and a daughter? Three generations of women from the same family anyway. I’m getting off track.

I ignore them easily as I try to find a loaf of bread that doesn’t look like it was baked more than a month ago. I want toast, not a paperweight, after all. I am a fussy consumer. I hear a shrieked protest.

“You can’t give her cat food: she’s not a cat!”

I glance round the corner of my aisle, trying not to seem too shifty. I contemplate the small selection of shampoos on offer as if I suddenly have a desperate urge to wash my hair. I think I’m being subtle but I’m probably as conspicuous as a man in a Stasi-issued trilby staring through two holes cut in a newspaper. It doesn’t matter. I turn, ever-so-nonchalantly, away from the Vosene Medicated and see the older of the two mothers, the grandmother if you like, looking at a tin of Whiskas. Her daughter has her hands on her hips. She is the one who has just offered this admonishment.

The older woman continues to look at the tin of cat food. She is lost in contemplation.

After an overly-long pause she glances up at her daughter.

“I’ll get it anyway.”

Guffawing, I have to turn away. I do hope she didn’t want to give it to the little girl in the pram.

1998 I think it was. A pub in Bristol. Can’t remember which one. I was having a couple of pints with my great friend Thos. Smoking, too. You could do that sort of thing then. A shabby gent, unwashed and hedgehog-chinned, charged up to us and tried to clamber under our table, eyes darting around. Hands constantly wringing, a pervasive smell of something unusual and chemical.

“Hide me: I’m a bank robber.”

He was clearly no such thing, unless a very unsuccessful one. The only thing he had probably stolen recently was the tube of Body Shop Hemp Handcream which he was perpetually rubbing into his hands like Lady Macbeth doing her out-damn-spot routine, flecks of the stuff spattering everything within five feet of him. We had a brief chat about his career as a professional drummer. This seemed perfectly natural at the time.

A member of the pub bar staff approached, asked him to leave.

Having clocked her, he turned conspiratorially toward us.

“You see that woman?” He leers at us. “If she stirs her tea clockwise, she’s ANY man’s.”

You can’t argue with that sort of thing.

A corner shop. Late at night. I am buying a pack of fags.

Two Asian men behind the counter, clearly having some sort of involved discussion. One turns from his friend to me.

“How many positions of bang are there in a woman? There must be at least 69, yes? They are numbered.”

I love that phrase, ‘positions of bang’. I’ve never had a chance to use it, though.

Kilburn. About a decade ago. I was stood in WHSmith, reading the newspapers. It’s what we did before the internet. That or the library. Libraries had more tramps and more of a crusty, fuggy aroma. Smith’s was cleaner, and had multiple copies of papers, so Smith’s was better. Smith’s even had magazines.

I was skimming through The Times, when suddenly a copy of The Sun was urgently flapped under my nose. I looked up. A troubled face was quizzing me, repeatedly stabbing a digit at the back page, specifically at a story about a footballer’s weekly wage.

“You see that number there?”

I did see. I confirmed as much.

“Is that a BIG number?”

It was somewhere in the thousands. I said, yes, it was pretty big, but such things were relative. The face looked momentarily less troubled. Then it shouted at me.

“A million! THAT’s a big number.”

I couldn’t deny it.

“Did you know that the sun is a million times bigger than the Earth?”

I wasn’t sure if anyone could be said to know such a thing but was also aware that an epistemological debate would clearly be neither relevant nor welcome. I told him I didn’t. He smiled proudly. He knew something I didn’t. That was enough for him. Knowledge is power.

For many people, one of the great pleasures in buying secondhand books is to find between the covers some evidence of a previous owner. Bookplates and carefully calligraphed names; inscriptions from friends or family; footnotes and angry annotations; opinions on torn pieces of paper hurriedly inserted at a random page or carefully pasted on to the endpapers; tram tickets and cigarette cards; reviews and author obituaries snipped from newspapers or journals; pressed flowers from some languid, long-ago summer afternoon when the book was last loved: such things somehow connect you with another time as well as another reader and offer an insight in to their past or perhaps even your own future in a way unique to this peculiar experience that causes certain book buyers to rhapsodise in similarly florid terms. Personally, I find it rather off-putting and annoying; if I want a book defaced I’ll bloody well do it myself. However, occasionally I will discover something that fills me with joy.

A couple of weeks ago I found a copy of The Moons Of Paradise [1], and I’ve been smirking ever since. It’s a book about tits. More specifically, as you will quickly deduce from its proper title, ‘The Moons Of Paradise: some reflections on the appearance of the female breast in art…’ by Mervyn Levy (Arthur Barker Ltd., 1962), it is a book about arty tits, a subject certainly ripe for exploration which, as far as I know, wasn’t tackled by the likes of EH Gombrich. (I could be wrong about that, of course; art historians are a notoriously rum bunch.) I’ve no idea how seriously Levy takes his subject either because I haven’t actually read the book, nor do I think it likely that I ever will. But then, I don’t need to; the previous owner of this copy has read it for me, and read it with a zeal and eye for detail that is little short of astonishing. Despite his obvious enthusiasm for the subject matter and the pains he has clearly taken in his annotations and additions, it seems he may have strayed slightly from the scholarly path on to the well-trodden promenade of seaside smut; but even if his amateur scholarship was academe’s loss (unless there is a secret Benny Hill Chair in Mammarial Studies at Cambridge), it is undoubtedly our gain. I think it best if I take you through the book page by page for a while.

We start with a quotation from Eugenio Coseriu [2], a mystic incantation and a bad French pun on the front endpapers:

sur les seins de l’epouse, on ecrase l’epoux.

A BRA, CAD, A BRA!

le seins-posium

Overleaf, the verso grants us further puns based around the word ‘seins’, whilst the recto gains two carefully-drawn papillary dots in each O of the word ‘MOONS’, the reflection that ‘Bust (bosom) is just sublimated bottom’ and the first hand-drawn bosom of many, labelled ‘From Great Divide to Cleavage’. I think you may be beginning to get the picture…

There are 31 further drawings of pairs of breasts on the dedication page (along with the inscription ‘tats for tits’),

and then the fun really begins. From here onward almost every single page of this 140-page book has a newspaper clipping, postcard, or picture inserted, each of which, as you may already have guessed, is… well… is like this:

and this:

and this:

You get the idea. Oh go on then; one more:

Several of the newspaper clippings are from 1970, so it seems fair to date this extraordinary endeavour of thematic archiving to around that point. From our hyper-sexualised vantage here in the early 21st Century, this book’s new contents seem rather innocent. Preserved for the last forty years as a memento mammary (I’m not going to apologise for that; it gets to you, this book; I’ve already had to stop myself talking about trips down mammary lane), it may seem little more than an oddity, a curious relic of one man’s unusual obsession, but I think that as an historical document (yes, really), this book might have some value. Discuss.

[1] Freudian typo: I originally wrote ‘mons’ instead of ‘moons’. Make of that what you will.
[2] No, me neither. Sorry. Google him.

I was never an enthusiastic cricketer as a youngster. Incompetent, I suppose would be the word to describe my batting and bowling. Fielding, too, come to that. Actually I rather liked fielding if only I could sit in the long grass as far from the crease as possible like Vivian Stanshall’s odd boy and hope the ball was never thwacked in my direction. Competent cricketers would make demands like ‘middle and leg’ when stepping up to bat. I had no idea what they meant. They may as well have been as Jake and had an extra leg as far as I was concerned. I always hoped to be bowled as quickly as possible so I could go back to the pavilion for a doze. Lack of team spirit, that man.

Many thanks to lovely Sue for resurrecting this site from whatever dusty recess of the internet in which it was temporarily stored.

This time round there will be pictures. Lots more pictures. I have a lot of old stuff to stick up here. Stuff like this:

First Capital Connect

Dear Sir or Madman,

I’m not much of a complainer. Indeed, being rather stuffily British I tend, when faced with a customer service problem, to grit my teeth, try to cope, and, if pressed, will generally do little worse than make a sarcastic or faintly patronising comment or two under my breath before trying to forget the whole thing ever happened.

You, as a representative of a rail company, are presumably regularly inundated with complaints, and will take no pleasure in reading yet another one. But there are times when nothing short of a rant will assuage the frothing cauldron of irritation in your brain, so I ask you to indulge me, if you would.

If, however, you’d only like the pertinent part of this complaint, do skip to the last couple of paragraphs.

Rail travel is often annoying. Everyone knows this. Things go wrong, there are delays and cancellations, there are engineering works and rail replacement bus services: these are all things one has to accept. The one thing I don’t count on, however, is not being able to get a ticket in the first place.

My girlfriend bought two return tickets from King’s Cross to Huntingdon online using her credit card – one for her and one for me – for a Bank Holiday weekend visit to her parents. She travelled up on the Friday, I was to join her on the Saturday. All easy enough so far. Unfortunately, my tickets were lost in the post, and so, as advised to do in such an event, I telephoned the number given in the booking confirmation email. I spoke to a very pleasant and helpful woman who informed me that I’d be able to collect my tickets from the ticket office at King’s Cross if I had the booking number and some ID. Easy enough, I thought.

I was wrong.

At the ticket office at King’s Cross, the rude and aggressively unhelpful man behind the counter (who it must be said was the only unhelpful person I encountered that day and, funnily enough, was the only one not wearing a name badge, refused to tell me his name when I asked, and is otherwise unidentifiable and whom, for the sake of narrative clarity, I think I shall refer to as Arbuthnot) stared angrily at me when I asked to collect my replacement tickets. Not being the holder of the credit card on which the tickets were bought I was, according to him, not allowed to collect my tickets.

“I spoke to someone on the phone-” I began.

Arbuthnot cut me off and spoke to me slowly as if I were stupid. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Which is why I’m trying to tell you,” I responded, foolishly thinking that explaining the problem might allow him to help me. He was unimpressed by this manoeuvre.

“If you don’t have the card you can’t get the tickets. You’ll have to go to the ticket office.” He then turned to the person behind me in the queue, ignoring my protestation that this actually was the ticket office.

I had by now missed my train so had more time on my hands. I called the booking line again. Again, a very helpful person told me that they’d faxed my booking confirmation to the ticket office so that I could collect the tickets. (Yes, faxed. I really do mean faxed. Staggering, isn’t it? Evidently as far as First Capital Connect is concerned, I mused, we are still in the early 1990s. If only their attitude towards ticket pricing were as backward-looking as that towards technology.)

If I could get the internal fax number of the machine in the ticket office, I was told on the phone, they’d send the document again, my tickets would be issued, and all would be well. Not trusting the intelligence of Arbuthnot – rightly, as it turned out – to grasp the complexities of this latest plan, I kept the man on the phone on hold as I approached the counter again. If there was no fax to confirm, could I have the fax number so that it could be re-sent? I asked. Alas not. He refused to give out the number because of – wait for it – ‘security issues’.

Now, I understand we live in sensitive times. The spectre of terrorism looms over us all, and ‘security’ is the word of the moment. I know that. Of course I do. We hear of little else from the government and the scare-mongering press nowadays. But the the thing is – and although I’m no expert I think I can be fairly confident about this – it just isn’t possible to fax a bomb to a train station. Documents yes. Bombs no. There is no way on earth that this can be done. What was the man worried about?

If he wouldn’t tell me the number, perhaps Arbuthnot would care to tell his colleague directly over the phone instead? Of course not. It could be anyone on the other end of the line. It could be a terrorist for pity’s sake! He could be being lured in to telling a terrorist a fax number who would then fax him a bomb and blow him up! That would never do, would it? No no no.

Arbuthnot was clearly getting angry with me for asking that he should do something so out of the ordinary as confer with people from the booking line of the very same company for which he worked, and I was getting frustrated with him for being so unhelpful. It was all rather a tiresome impasse.

Then inspiration struck him. In time-old tradition he dealt with this problem by passing the buck. “Go and talk to Gary the station supervisor,” he told me. “He’s on platform nine in an orange jacket.”

I went off to find Gary and started the process again. In a pleasant change, I found Gary to be very helpful, friendly, courteous and polite. He took me in to his office where we both sat by a fax machine as I called the booking line yet again, explained the situation yet again, this time was able to give them the coveted fax number and, some time later, was delighted as the fax finally turned up. I was ushered on to the platform where the next train was about to pull out of the station, an hour after my original, planned one, had departed.

What an absolutely unnecessary waste of everyone’s time it all was.

Interested readers may pick up the story here:

In the spirit of friendly suggestion then, here is something you might want to consider mentioning to those in charge of such things:

Please, please, please establish some form of system of communication between booking line and station. Not by a fax machine in a distant office, but a phone system, or if pushed an online system. This sort of thing must happen quite often and the provisions to deal with it are, frankly, useless. That is all. It seems fairly simple to me, but then what do I know?

On the day that sees Jonathan Ross’s return to the nation’s television screens, and when every columnist and cultural commentator seems, yet again, to be tiresomely banging on about the BBC, its function and responsibilities (ugh), here are two sides of a different, though superficially similar, argument from the papers which I read recently:

“Surely we have enough horrors already in the daily papers – outrages and murders of little girls – and the broadcasting of this sort of thing only encourages the morbid tendency which leads to these crimes. I submit that the BBC is making a gross misuse of its powers.”

“Those who do not want this sort of excitement can always switch off and leave the others to their enjoyment. If the BBC is to make progress, it ought to be given a free hand and not be intimidated by minorities. Otherwise it will become a mere purveyor of the lowest common denominator in amusement.”

The first is from an unnamed correspondent in the Morning Post, the second a leader from the Evening Star. Both are from 16th January 1932 and relate to the first radio broadcast of Patrick Hamilton’s play, Rope. The controversy, such as it was, was deliberately fomented by Val Gielgud in order to provide free publicity for the broadcast, and shows that press manipulation and public debate about the rôle of the BBC has been going on since its inception and that, thankfully, wittering from either side of the debate was then ultimately as ineffectual as it is now: millions were entertained when they tuned in to listen.

Patrick Hamilton has been a favourite author of mine since a friend put me on to his 1941 novel Hangover Square when I was at university. Set in the growing shadows of Fascism before the Second World War, it’s a blackly comic if unsettling read, the story of George Harvey Bone, a lonely schizophrenic ill-equipped to deal with his own life, who falls for an archetypal wrong woman in whom he mistakenly sees an escape from his miserable existence. Inevitably, he descends ever further in to alcoholic madness as a result of his growing obsession in the face of her indifference to, and exploitation of, him. As a study in human frailty it serves as an extreme warning to all who find their hearts leading them in the wrong direction of what might happen if they can’t see when to abandon their folly. The power and compassion of Hamilton’s writing is such that, as you watch Bone gradually fall apart, you find yourself on his side even though you can see his mistakes for what they are and are desperately urging him to come to his senses. It is this which makes the ending truly tragic: it could all so easily have been prevented if only he had been more self-aware. Hamilton speaks to the victim in all of us, and Bone suffers vicariously on our behalf. If you haven’t read it then you’re in for a treat.

Most of Hamilton’s books are currently in print, as is Nigel Jones’ biography Through A Glass Darkly (published by the superb Black Spring Press, the small imprint which led the Kyril Bonfiglioli revival in the 1990s, and which also introduced me to the writings of Julian Maclaren-Ross, for which I will be eternally grateful).