A Survey

1. What date from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

4^th August. This was the day when, in the blazing sunshine, I saw the councillor for Sutton Four Oaks sitting outside a pub. She was drinking a large glass of white wine. Two men and another woman were with her, and though I’ve done my utmost to research who they are, I have so far been able to come up with nothing. I bought a gin and tonic and sat at a nearby table. Though close, I was unable to properly catch their conversation, except in snippets. They were talking about house prices, of all things. Drinking, I looked over at the councillor. I am drawn – why am I drawn? – ineluctably to voluptuous, middle aged right wing women. Families milled around us, people were drinking and enjoying the afternoon sunshine. Between her and I there was only the wind. I swear, her eyelids dropped when I looked over at her. I swear her cheeks coloured. She became distracted, losing the thread of the conversation, then trying to laugh it off when she was caught out. And she looked back over at me. I was wearing a light purple shell suit jacket, and I undid the zip a little. Again she lost the thread of their conversation, and one of her compatriots made some remark about how quickly she had drank her wine. She had, she had. The glass was nearly gone. I drained my own drink. The gin put a burr on the whole performance. She was wearing a long peasant style dress. Utterly inappropriate, but it did the job. I walked towards her and stood just at her right side. She and the others looked up, confusion in their eyes, expectation, lust even, in hers. I put my left hand onto my balls and gripped them tightly. I pumped my right fist upwards and bellowed “Fascist!” into the sky, at her, and into the sky again.

2. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

I crashed over a hundred parties in Sutton Coldfield. Evenings I would buy a bottle of wine, put a shirt on and go walking down the hill, towards the town. I walked in whatever direction took my fancy. I was free. I kept mainly to streets of houses and I would look for parties. When I saw one going on, I would knock at the door and introduce myself to whoever answered, merely that. I would not say, unless pressed (though I rarely ever was), that I was a friend of someone, or that some other had invited me. Usually it was enough to be at the door, to give the wine over, to smile, to make some banal joke.

Once inside I would make for the toilet. Inside my jacket I would be sure to have a bottle of decent gin – none of your cheap swill – and at least two grams of ketamine. I would rack up a good sized line, perhaps a little under half the first gram, and take it, using a train ticket from Four Oaks to Shenstone that I bought for the purpose (what a dog of a place Shenstone is, my heart, my pity goes out to it).

Back at the party, I would try to corner a woman and be as boring as possible. To bore a Sutton Coldfield woman is by no means difficult. If I turned my discourse to art, to politics, literature, music, philosophy, her eyes would flit from mine around the room, looking for someone to discuss the quickest route to drive from Mere Green to Wyndley, or the Four Oaks pub with the comfiest chairs, how many weightwatchers points are in such and such a cake – topics that chimed with her deepest, most heartfelt interests. But I would remain steadfast. I perfected a way of relating the plot of Pasolini’s ‘Salo’ in excruciating detail, but without being too coarse or graphic. I would stress the film’s dense matrix of political implications. I would use the phrase ‘dense matrix’ over and over as the ketamine gained its hold on me, reached a crescendo, and fell away. It felt like a suitable phrase. Other times I would ask the woman meticulous questions about her life and her job. I would try to extract all the current gossip from her job. I would laugh heartily, and often. These women, when I did that, they loved it.

I would mingle. I have become very adept at mingling. It seems that I do best, socially, when I am among those I despise. One might see this as a cruel irony, but, no, I feel it’s something more. It’s a perversity of spirit within me that I now, after all this time, can recognise. I see now that my manner of interacting with the world is essentially juvenile. I reveal little of myself, I hold back, I take. I prefer to be cryptic than open. I prefer to wear a mask than show my real face. My emotions remain a mystery to me. My perpetual feeling is disgust, but a disgust that feels put on, that I could discard, that I don’t feel at all strongly about.

The best times were when I would go out into the back garden and see some of the men passing a joint around. I’d go over and, feigning meekness, request a drag. Then I would stand there with them, each of us staring up at black space, and I would gently probe them about their aspirations, their dreams. Each one of the dreams I heard was so petty – to have a better car, to get a promotion, to fuck some woman at the office, to pay off the mortgage – so small, that it made me feel a great warmth at how utterly dismal a place the universe is, and of all the many parts in it, Sutton Coldfield is its miserable nadir.

3. What was your biggest failure?

My biggest failure was not fucking G_______. What an utter waste of time that whole enterprise was. I almost feel like not talking about it. I first encountered G_______ on Facebook – the new work colleague of a friend, she began to appear in various photographs of nights out. Events unfolded in their usually, drearily predictable way. I have such perspicacity regarding the process – I can see it all, from the promising start to the disappointing end, as though I were a chess computer. And yet, the most important stage – what attracts me to one woman and not another, what makes me pick the ones I pick, remains entirely inscrutable. Some of the women at those parties I crashed, I feel strongly that they would have fucked me. But I wasn’t interested.

G_______ attracted me deeply though. After seeing her pictures, thoughts of her consumed me for several weeks. One morning I woke up thinking of her, and masturbated, something I haven’t done for some time. I didn’t even need to put the computer on to look at the pictures. I was reluctant to contact her; there is nothing like a Facebook profile to make a beautiful woman seem revolting, but after a time, as with all stimulants, I needed more. She accepted my friend request, which gave me access to some more pictures. Her profile was deceptively content-free. She listed no interests, she liked nothing, she made no status updates. She was tagged in a lot of pictures, and she occasionally chatted with her younger sister about the family dog. I was perplexed, but my ardour did not diminish.

Looking back, perhaps it is that blankness that attracted me first. She had, in the pictures, a quite stupid look on her face for the most part. She looked as though she had never been told how to smile at a camera, or how to stand properly. I can see that some men find that type of thing charming, a woman who does not know her own beauty, that type of thing. But for me it was something else, her demeanour held – or I thought it held – some contempt, some repulsion. Her hands, in every picture, or most at least, gripped whatever surface was nearby with an intensity. For me I think the erotic is found in desperation. I find the erotic in the daily struggle against bourgeois life, but especially where that struggle takes on some physical manifestation. I found – or I thought I found – such a manifestation in G______’s looks and her posture in those photographs.

I suspect that would have been it, I would have gotten bored with her after a time, except that one evening, after I had posted some withering status update on the subject of, oh, I forget, Sarah Palin perhaps, and G______ had clicked to say that she liked it. She was still online, so I sent her a message using the chat applet, and we began to talk. And she seemed a strange girl, lacking in self-confidence, but with a certain arrogance, or self-assuredness, that I recognised as something different from the generic Sutton Coldfield arrogance. She knew little, but thought that the little she knew was impressive. She derided the things she was ignorant about. She used her own ignorance as a badge of honour, as a way of staving off her own fears about death, hers and everybody else’s. She was a child, really, just a kid.

To cut a long story short, anyway, I never fucked her.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?

I slapped the face of one of the most prominent, no, I'll say it, the most prominent young conservative in Sutton Coldfield. She came away with just bruises. I found a skateboard in Sutton Park which I rode for a short time, causing severe grazing to my knees after I fluffed a tricky dismount. I threw that thing into a ditch. In March, I listened to Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ for eighteen hours and forty minutes. I sat entirely still, in the darkness, for the duration (I had put the Reinbert de Leeuw mp3 on a loop). I saw nothing meditative or transcendent about the experience. In fact, the experience brings into serious question the very notion of a meditative state. Throughout, I struggled, as any of my true brothers and sisters would, in fighting off a kind of trance state that emerges when the boredom of passivity and repetition gives way to acceptance and indifference. The mistake that Satie made, a mistake then repeated by the 60s dilettantes, who took the idea to its logical endpoint, was to assume that the transcendence of boredom is a positive thing. I am edified by my boredom. I want to destroy the circumstances that lead to my boredom. Satie wants to revel in tedium, to erase through sheer force the desire to change the state of the world. Anyone who sits down to meditate is gifting time to those in power, time that could be spent fighting against them. Retreat into boredom is the death of the revolutionary spirit, it is a genuflection to power. I also ate courgette for the first time. I found it mediocre.

2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I have never resolved to do anything, nor will I ever.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

I would never allow that. It’s not really my thing.

4. What countries did you visit?

None. I never visit no countries. There was an occasion in 1996 when I was invited to Burkina Faso, but you know what? I looked into it and it just wasn’t for me.

5. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

I lacked grace. I lacked the ability to laugh at my own mistakes. I lacked the ability to shake off defeat and the ability to be humble in victory. I lacked the competence to fully comprehend my own limitations. I lacked the meekness to apologise when I went beyond those limitations and caused danger or distress to other people. I lacked the character to see the value in ever apologising. I lacked the foresight to predict when my actions would upset people or when I would overstep the mark. I lacked the control to not seek revenge against those who wronged me. I lacked around thirty blowjobs, which I am sure I am owed. All those things, please, let me have in spades in 2010.

6. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

4^th August. Several weeks before this date, I was contacted via Facebook by someone I went to secondary school with. They made a friend request which I, curious, accepted. His fat balloon head, which had been fat as a child, had grown even more rotund, vaster and more big, if his profile pictures were anything to go by. The dickhead was now an actuary, whatever the hell that is, and there were various pictures of him and his ugly wife – by and large unposed shots showing merely parts of their faces or bodies. More amusingly, the man seemed to think of himself as something of a music buff, listing bands like Elbow, The Manic Street Preachers and The Arctic Monkeys as bands he loved and even having a section in his profile of music he hates, which included manufactured pop, rap, dance, country and r&b.

During a particularly damp week, I began to engage in correspondence with this man. I asked him about his life, his loves, his children, his work. I did what most people never do for this man – I showed interest in him. He emerged, as all right-wingers inevitably do, as damaged and insecure, small minded, ready to strike out at anyone doing something he is unable or unwilling to do. The great disease of the right wing is this need to strike first, to strike at any difference from yourself, to strike in the sincerely held fear that you are about to be struck.

The man repeatedly joined Facebook groups dedicated to criticising and mocking popstars. He made update after update about his work colleagues daring to put a commercial radio station on in his presence, or of hearing a pop song in a supermarket, or someone even singing a bit of an ABBA song in a lift. Someone sang a little bit of the chorus to ‘Dancing Queen’ in the same lift as this man and he typed a complaint about it on his computer and sent it to all his friends.

After a couple of weeks of passing messages back and forth (messages where he asked almost nothing about me, such was his solipsism), I invited him and his wife round for dinner. I explained that my partner was away (everything on my Facebook is a lie) and that I would be glad of the company. Even before he accepted my message I began to work at the issue of what music to put on while they were round. By the time the invitation was accepted I had already burned several CDs of potential material. One contained turn of the millennium Ska Punk, mostly b-sides, but also included Less Than Jake’s magisterial ‘All My Friends are Metal Heads’. I made a CD with only cover versions of ‘In A Gadda Da Vida’. The issue was not to simply pick novelty aggravating music, but to choose something that I could present legitimately as my own taste, so that it would irritate this man, but not to the point where he felt he was being messed around. I made one of pop ‘mashups’ (the kind where you have the rap from ‘Straight Outta Compton’ playing over the instrumental from ‘Young Hearts Run Free’) and one which alternated between short free jazz pieces and high BPM techno.

He and his wife arrived and, though he had difficulty squeezing his fat head through my door, they were quickly seated next to each other on my sofa, a glass of wine in his hand and her, driving, with water. A light piano piece played on the stereo, the lights were dim. I decided that I would play, on repeat, Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ (the Reinbert de Leeuw version), for the duration of the evening. His ugly wife was the first to mention the music, saying, “This is nice, what is it?” as we tucked into our starter of very salty scrambled eggs. I sat back and began to expound on ‘Vexations’, its search for transcendence through slow, painstaking repetition. I told them about the performances of the piece in the 1960s by John Cage and all those people. Just as I served the main course, a pasta dish with far too much garlic in it, I told them about Satie eating only white food. I sat back, rapt, and listened to the music. One can only achieve transcendence, I said, by engaging with boredom, by entering boredom and recognising it as a beautiful state. As I said this, out of the corner of my eye I could see this man rolling his eyes at his wife. We sat in silence and ate. He forced the food down, and I could see that as the phrase repeated itself over and over, he got more and more wound up. He said nothing, but his wife tried to engage me, asking questions about the job I told them I have and so on. As I lied I would occasionally appear to become distracted by the music and I would again bring up its meditative qualities, its beauty, its importance, the questions surrounding interpretation, the various performances available on record and the merits and shortcomings of this version compared to the others. He drank faster and moved the food around his plate. I bought out a rock hard cake for dessert which he looked at with utter contempt. I said I had to go to the toilet and when I returned, his wife explained that she wasn’t feeling too well, and they excused themselves. He looked physically done in. I graciously accepted, saying that I would spend the remainder of the evening bathing in ‘Vexations’, becoming truly meditative, seeking enlightenment.

Unfortunately, two minutes later they were back at my door. I had known they would be, because when I excused myself to go to the toilet, I had in fact gone out the back door and slashed their tyres. “Someone has slashed our tyres,” said his ugly wife. I waved them in, explaining that I had turned the Satie up to truly abet my rumination. They sat uncomfortably as I invited them to try a succession of false taxi numbers. He accepted another glass of wine and she tutted at him. He glared at her. This moment between them was to me more beautiful and truly human than anything Satie and his bloodless ilk could ever concoct. The phrase played sweetly on. It was the soundtrack to their antagonism. I continued to chatter on about Satie’s collaboration with Jean Cocteau, the drawing Picasso did of him. I began to ask them questions about the phrasing of the piece, whether they thought de Leeuw brought too much warmth, about the curious intersection between modernist avant-garde practice and Eastern religion, but by then they were both spent.

Another ten minutes went by while I pretended to look for a working taxi number. I left the room and listened at the door, but they said nothing to each other for a full fifteen minutes. After that I called a taxi and they left. I’m still his friend on Facebook, he still talks a lot of crap about music.

7. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

After months of cajoling and supplication, P_______ finally sent me the nude pictures she had been hinting at. They were racier than I had ever dreamed. Opening my email that day was literally like opening Pandora’s Box.

8. What was your biggest failure?

The slow continuing death of socialism. It was my failure, it was all of our failures.

9. Did you suffer illness or injury?

It is rare a day goes by when I do not suffer. It is the same for every man and woman. To wake up and look at the hole we have made of the world is enough. I cannot love and that wounds me. The air makes me wretch. I stand in the air and I am afflicted. My inability to love afflicts me. And yet I look out at the mire in all direction, the mire that goes on endlessly and heaps up further with each passing year and I see nothing worth loving. The illness I suffer, it’s my own and it is heaped up on me by this dog of a world.

I had chicken pox too, for three weeks in September.

10. What were the best things you bought?

A tin of sweetcorn.

A Survey

Have you ever licked the back of a CD to try to get it to work?

I struggle to see how this would improve the chances of getting a CD to work. In answer to the question though, yes, I have done that. It never works though, perhaps I should start brushing my teeth beforehand.

What's the largest age difference between yourself and someone you've dated?

I think it is sixty eight years.

Ever been in a car wreck?

I was in a car accident that killed my friend G_____, who was the driver at the time. I believe he was killed instantly. We were driving through Mere Green, I forget now where we were heading to, but we were on the road north, out of the city. The driver of the other car, whose fault the accident was, she survived. I should have decked that bitch at the time, but I was too out of it, I can’t even remember her face. Just as the other car hit us we were listening to Rod Stewart’s ‘Do You Think I’m Sexy?’ on the CD player and the impact of the crash must have changed the settings on the player so that for the hours I was trapped in the car waiting to be cut out by the fire brigade, G______ sprawled out dead on the seat next to me, ‘Do You Think I’m Sexy’ playing over and over again, blood flowing slowly but constantly from a wound on the side of G______’s jaw. It took a long time before I could listen to that song again, at least six months.

Were you popular in high school?

I was popular for about one week in secondary school when I stole a pile of my dad’s pornography magazines and videos and handed them out to people. I recall that he discovered they were missing, but couldn’t say anything. I recall also making speeches at dinner about how pornography degrades women and about all the filthy, depraved men who used it, my mother nodding along. That might sound a little cruel but, I don’t know, you try coming home from school a little early one day to catch your dad weeping and masturbating over a video of two women, naked apart from Darth Vader masks, punching each other in the stomach.

Have you ever been on a blind date?

Yes. Just one. I recall being guided in by the waiter, she was already sitting down. He had to read us out the menu so we could choose. That took a while, in fact there was an uncomfortably long period where she seemed unable to decide between two very similar dishes during which I began already to dislike her. I persisted though and we began to talk about this and that and she seemed very agreeable altogether. Naturally I held back certain aspects of my personality, as I’m sure she held back some of hers. This is the common way of going about these things. Eating was equally difficult, but with the aid of a bib I don’t think I spilled too much either on myself or the table. It was hard to tell how much she was drinking, but as the meal progressed she steadily became increasingly giggly, and the polite way she had begun answering my questions gave way to the kind of flimsy coquetry that suggests that her family have probably been pure whitebread English since the ice age and also that she probably votes for the British National Party. We left the restaurant together and took a taxi back to her home. Of course, I had no notion of where we were. I permitted her to remove her blindfold – she promised not to look at me – so that she could find her way down her drive and open the door to her house. I kept behind her the whole time, guided by her hand. She lead me up to her bedroom and we sat on the bed for a time and drank. She made me a decent gin and tonic as I recall (the secret is to buy very expensive gin). Gingerly we felt each other’s faces and arms with our hands. For the first time I felt her slender nose, her ears, her hair. And she mine, also, simultaneously. We fell together and I felt her warmth against me first and then again and again. In the indifferent darkness we came together, clothed only in our blindfolds (and I in a condom), again and again we came together, a realm of pure sensory ebullience, a realm of blissful unselfish partisanship. That night, we slept soundly together, soundly as good children sleep, still masked, still clothed in darkness.

In the half light of the next morning, early, I woke up with my mouth dry. Absent-mindedly I removed the blindfold and saw my companion for the first time. She looked so peaceful there, hair partially covering her face, one small foot poking out of the rumpled duvet. I left the room and scoured the flat for a bathroom. The light was coming in from the east, the clouds gently, so gently, empurpled by the white sun. I stood naked in the coming light and felt renewed. I got a glass of water and drank down its sweet life-giving nectar. I was so refreshed by it. I wandered into the living room and flicked through her bookshelf. I picked up an Ian McEwen book, still pristine enough to have never been read by her, which was comforting, and turned to the reviews on the first few pages. Unable to read them in the half light I pulled open the thin floral curtains. But before my eyes had chance to flick over to “McEwen’s political insights are brought to bear in this discomfiting tour-de-force all about one man’s lack of empathy for victims of war,” I noticed a shock of blue in the bottom corner of the window glass. This shock, both to me and in the gaudy colouring of the sticker (for that is what it was) were so devastating that I cast the book outside and came to rest, head first, on the leatherette sofa. When I was able to recover my composure I sat up and looked again at the sticker, hoping to Christ that I had been mistaken. I had not. It did say ‘Vote Conservative!’ Stricken, I returned to the bedroom. It was still not yet quite light. I masturbated, briefly and furiously, and came on her sleeping face and hair. Then I picked up my clothes and left the flat. This was the first and last time I ever used match dot com.

Are looks important?

Looks are important. Of course one might be lead to say these days that people think that looks are too important or that people care too much about how they look and neglect what they are inside. But, I don’t know, when I see people I often think, Yes, I would beak that person or No, I would not beak that person, based solely on how they look. That’s important, to me at least.

Do you have any friends that you've known for 10 years or more?

I don’t think so. I tend really to keep friends for far shorter periods. A week is usually enough with most people.

By what age would you like to be married?

Nah.

Does the number of people a person's slept with affect your view of them?

The more the merrier, I say.

Have you ever made a mistake?

I have made five mistakes. The last one, the fifth one, was disastrous.

Are you a good tipper?

My attitude is that tipping helps maintain the illusion that waiters and bar staff and whoever else you might tip are adequately paid by their shyster employers. It is my hope that by not tipping these people they will eventually see sense and rise up against their managers and wrest control from them.

What's the most you have spent for a haircut?

50p

Have you ever had a crush on a teacher?

There is something so vividly appealing about the profession of teacher for me. I think a true revolution, a clandestine revolution, on the part of teachers could be the first step on towards the overthrow of capitalism. I used to hang around a local primary school. At first the interest was in the children – I enjoy seeing these little bastards being manufactured – Sutton Coldfield turning them into what their parents are, it makes me sad. After a while I began to notice one particular teacher, a svelte redhead who possessed chic poise standing in the playground and managed to exert a measured control over the kids without resorting to the ridiculous and demeaning histrionics of her colleagues. Without much difficulty I obtained her name, and from that I tracked down her facebook page, which fortunately for me was public. I discovered one or two things about her. I discovered, for example, that she enjoys the music of that charlatan and impostor Tom Waits and the novels of that bore Toni Morrison. What, though, I asked myself, was such a woman doing living and working in Sutton Coldfield?

One evening I followed her home to an indifferent street on the Walmley side of the town, one that I had not been down before. Her house, too, showed no signs of the individuality and style so evident in her manner of dress. A couple of hours later a car pulled into the drive and a young man got out. Evidently this clown was her partner. He was pure Sutton, this guy, he looked like a hair-dye model that had been sexually repressed and beaten regularly as a child. He, surely, was the reason she was here, no other.

I lost interest in her then and didn’t think of her for some time. Then, one afternoon I spotted her in the big Sainsbury’s in Mere Green. It must have been the school holidays, I suppose. I followed her round. She bought a lot of vegetables, I seem to recall. I tried to look at her objectively, but I just couldn’t get out of my head the image of her and that man – her laughing at his jokes, her sucking his dick. The fact that she would degrade herself night after heinous night with that filthy man, that fact really turned me off her.

Have you ever peed in public?

What does public really mean anymore? I’ve pissed on golf courses. I’ve pissed in the back gardens of my neighbours. I’ve pissed on the platforms of train stations and up against trains. I’ve pissed against the side walls of banks and all over expensive cars. I pissed on a pile of Ian McEwan books. I pissed through the letter box of a local conservative MP. I’ve pissed on the graves of bad people. I’ve pissed in an alleyway in Sutton centre on a Friday night, when the piss runs out of every back street, so that my piss joined the common stock in the fecund drains and sewers that carry the human waste out of the town. I really felt like something then, I can tell you.

What song do you want played at your funeral?

Chick Corea’s ‘Return to Forever’.

Would you tell your parents if you were gay?

I don’t think things like that are appropriate to discuss with my parents. I would say that before my father died they knew around one percent of the things I get up to, around one percent of my true character. Now, perhaps this has increased to two, maybe even three percent.

What would your last meal be before getting executed?

A plate of dirt.

Beatles or Stones?

I have no particular liking for either.

Beer, wine or hard liquor?

Gin.

Do you have any phobias?

I have a phobia of cars.

A Survey

1. PICK OUT A SCAR YOU HAVE, AND EXPLAIN HOW YOU GOT IT?

 

I have three scars. The one I choose to explain was caused by a shard of plastic hitting the skin just beneath my right eye and cutting it quite deeply. When the cut healed it left a small oval-shaped scar. I got this particular scar in 1997, in the car crash that killed my friend G______. Another car went into the driver’s side of the car we were in. G_____ was the one driving. I’ve never had any desire to drive. It always frightened me. I haven’t travelled in a car since that day and I have no intention of any subsequent travel in one. I no longer regard them as safe. I sometimes look at the scar. In certain lights, particularly the light of my bathroom, it appears quite prominently. I don’t attach any special meaning to it, nothing like that. I don’t think it represents anything. The plastic that hit it was from part of the car door I think.  I heard the impact and instinctively turned toward the noise. That’s when the piece of plastic struck me. We were right in the middle of Mere Green, by the roundabout. I still have the plastic, I picked it up when I got out of the car. It’s a piece of grey plastic.

 

2. WHAT IS ON THE WALLS IN YOUR ROOM?

On the south facing wall I have a lot of photographs of horses that I have cut out of library books. The whole wall is covered in these horses. The books I borrowed from the libraries in Sutton Coldfield over a period of several months. Not all of them were to do with horses or specifically to do with horses. They just happened to have pictures of horses in them. Recently, having registered a new library card under a pseudonym (remarkably simple given the frankly antiquated  system), I have been going  to Mere Green library and complaining to the staff there about their corrupted and inadequate stock. Look, you chiefs, I say to them, all I wanted was a book with a photograph of a horse in it. That’s all I wanted.  This book appears to have had photographs of horses in it but they have all been removed. What do you have to say about that? These charlatan librarians, these philistines, have so little of value to say about that I won’t even waste time typing what they have to say about it. Then I go home and look at all my photographs of horses and I have a bloody good laugh about it.

 

3. WHAT DOES YOUR PHONE LOOK LIKE?

 

It’s grey.

 

4. WHAT MUSIC DO YOU LISTEN TO?

Principally I listen to Chick Corea, though I do spend time listening to other things sometimes as well.

5. WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT DESKTOP PICTURE?

A big photograph of Chick Corea’s face. The picture was taken in the mid-seventies I believe. Chick has a nice beard in it.

6. WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW?

Right now what I want more than anything is a good blow job. Sutton Coldfield is like the Death Valley of blow jobs – arid and sandy.

7. DO YOU BELIEVE IN GAY MARRIAGE?

I have no problem with the gays doing anything they want to do. They are a fantastic bunch of lads. All credit to them.

8. WHAT TIME WERE YOU BORN?

In the afternoon. I know that my mother had time to be done with me and to get ready for Coronation Street anyway.

9. ARE YOUR PARENTS STILL TOGETHER?

No, my dad is dead.

10. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?

Currently the song I am listening to is Chick Corea’s ‘Captain Senor Mouse’ from the album ‘Hymn to the Seventh Galaxy’. The song deals with the themes of despair, alienation and worry from the point of view of the mouse of the title. I have always read the song as being an indictment of hierarchy. The mouse is torn between his role as a captain and his role as a man of the crowd, a senor. In this way Corea captures effortlessly the ambivalence we all feel about the gulf between our personal and professional personas. It deals with the schism between what we have to do to earn the money to live and our true desires about how we want to spend our time. For me this song addresses the key political question of our time, the value of work, the value of production over human desire.

11. DO YOU GET SCARED OF THE DARK?

I have been, sure. I have been scared of the dark.

12. THE LAST PERSON TO MAKE YOU CRY?

Sarah Palin.

13. WHAT KIND OF HAIR/EYE COLOR DO YOU LIKE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX?

I prefer them to be bald and blind.

14. DO YOU LIKE PAINKILLERS?

I take painkillers every day. I love them. I love what they do to my pain. I love walking around in their treacly haze. I might go now and bang a few ibuprofen then run down the golf course and take a piss up a tree.

15. COFFEE OR ENERGY DRINKS?

I tell you what, fuck the French for banning the Red Bull. What has he ever done to them? And you know what else? Fuck the Red Bull light, fuck the Red Bull sugar free. Fuck the decaf. Fuck the soy milk. You know? All that stuff is bullshit.

16. FAVE PIZZA TOPPING?

If this is some kind of innuendo then pepperoni. If not then I do like the ham and pineapple.

17. IF YOU COULD EAT ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE?

Sarah Palin.

18. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU MADE ANGRY?

I think it was J______.  I first encountered J on the Twitter website. Her icon was a picture of her grinning. There was something about this grin of hers that attracted me. Her posts on the Twitter website were almost exclusively of asinine quality. I did this, I went here, that kind of thing. But still, that particular picture was something. I discovered both her myspace page and her facebook page and I added her as a friend on both. The pages revealed little about her that was attractive. She seemed educationally and psychologically stunted. Her spelling for one was appalling.  She seemed reluctant to talk with me at first, but after a time I was able to obtain her email address and we began to chat over the MSN instant messenger service. By feigning interest in a terrible, horrible, awful band called Scouting For Girls (and pretending I was nineteen and attractive) I was able to win J’s trust. Each day I grew in her estimation. After about a month of instant messaging each other on and off (she was away on holiday for a few days and she had mock exams to prepare  for) I was able to persuade her to make a short video on her webcam in which she took off all her clothes. She was nervous, you could see that, but it was good. I liked that she was nervous. At one point, while undoing the button on her jeans, she grinned like in her Twitter picture, which I did enjoy. Yes, I enjoyed that. More recently though she has become taciturn with me. She keeps asking me for another picture of myself which, since I obtained the original from a forgotten myspace account of some tattooed goon, I am unable to provide. She keeps pretending her webcam is broken. I know she is lying to me.  Just today she appeared on MSN and then when I sent her a message she disappeared offline. I checked her myspace and facebook and she was logged into both. She has clearly blocked me. Why would she do this?

19. DO YOU SPEAK ANOTHER LANGUAGE?

Yeah.

20. WHAT WAS THE LAST GIFT SOMEONE GAVE YOU?

Someone gave me a handful of dirt.

21. ARE YOU FINDING YOURSELF INCREASINGLY POLITICISED BY THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE?

What a troublesome question. Yes? No? I don’t feel that the recession has hit Sutton Coldfield yet. The people still get up, get in their cars and drive to their jobs. They bring back bags and bags full of stuff from the supermarket. They sit in their gardens and drink. They go to the pub. These guys, the rich guys, they aren’t affected by the things that affect the poor. The poor continue to fester in the mire created by the rich, only the depth of the banks of that mire changes, sweeping a few people in or allowing them to climb out. This has been happening for centuries, why should it politicise me now?

22. ARE YOU DOUBLE JOINTED?

 

No, but I have seen some very agreeable videos of people who are.

23. HAVE YOU EVER WATCHED PORN?

Yes I have watched it for fun and for pleasure. I have watched it for emotion, for humiliation, for desperation, for sadness, for joy, for clarity. I have watched porn for people and for objects, for violence and for tenderness, for money and for charity, for things that are owed and things that are given freely.

24. WHAT'S YOUR DREAM CAR?

One car that is continually smashing into the face of Sir Fred Goodwin.

25. DO YOU BELIEVE IN AFTER-LIFE?

Certainly not.

26. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MARRIAGE?

 

I think it is a disgusting institution formulated by the Right to keep the working classes bickering with each other and hence forestall glorious revolution.

27. WOULD YOU FALL IN LOVE KNOWING THAT THE PERSON IS LEAVING?

Usually this is the only way to make it bearable.

28. WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO TELL SOMEONE HOW MUCH THEY MEAN TO YOU?

I think it’s a text message containing a link to your twitter account where you’ve put a link to a file on rapidshare which is an mpeg of you miming and dancing to ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’, the superior Herbie Hancock version from his 2005 album ‘Possibilities’.

29. MUSICAL GUILTY PLEASURE?

I like to put ‘Grease’ on and shout racist abuse at John Travolta.

30. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE DOING IN FIVE YEARS TIME?

I have no fucking idea.  I don’t think about the future in such an asinine  way. People who do are people who end up as managers or bankers or policemen. I stand against all that.

31. WHAT IS THE ONE PHONE NUMBER SHOWS UP ON YOUR PHONE THE MOST?

I don’t understand the question.

32. WHAT ANNOYS YOU MOST?

Man’s inhumanity to man. Unequal distribution of wealth.

33. WHICH FOREIGN COUNTRIES HAVE YOU VISITED IN THE LAST TWELVE MONTHS?

I have not visited a single foreign country, no.

34. YOUR WEAKNESS?

Thinking at length about the terrible prospects in store for any kid that I see. I look at a particular kid walking around on the same street as me. A kid with a backpack and an ipod and jeans and all that junk and I think about the world that this kid is part of and what the world is going to be  like when this kid gets to an age where it has to work and how terrible that moment is going to be for that kid. If I am feeling particularly weak I will give up whatever destination I have in mind and follow this kid and think about all the terrible things they are going to have to endure. Just think about it. One day your son or daughter will have to get up early in the morning, dress in clothes they aren’t comfortable in, go to a room containing one or another dickhead in a suit. This particular dickhead, whichever one it happens to be, will ask them all kinds of questions, pretending (both the dickhead and the questions) that they mean anything or have any significance. The dickhead will pretend, for example, that he or she really wants to know what your son or daughter’s weaknesses are. But they don’t really want to know what your son or daughter’s weaknesses are! The question is really asking your son or daughter if they are able to come up with a fictional attribute of theirs which might on first examination appear to be negative but which can be subsequently elaborated upon to make it seem not negative at all, perhaps even positive. Don’t let this happen to your kids! The dickhead might ask them to relay a situation in which your son or daughter has worked in a team. Do they want to really know what it is like to work as a team? No. No, that’s not what this dickhead will want to know. Do they want to know what it is like to interact with another man or a woman with a collective goal? Do they want to know things that your son or daughter really think? Their fears, their desires? No. What they are asking is for your kid to tell a fictitious story that makes them look good involving at some point doing something in a team. This is what is really being asked for. I follow these kids around and I think about them in these terrible situations. That is my weakness. Your son or daughter will have to somehow gain the ability to parse these bizarre and banal questions and discern what is really being asked for and then lie to make themselves fit that subtext of the question while ostensibly answering the real asked question. One day soon your child will have to do that. What are you going to do about it?

35. WHAT WAS THE LAST GIFT YOU GAVE?

This one particular guy I see around fairly often, he lives just at the bottom of the hill here, there’s something I really dislike about him. That dislike has recently turned into hatred. It’s difficult to say why, I just see him around a lot, he has this ridiculous little dog that he’s forever walking around. It has seemed to me of late that he is absolutely archetypal of the Sutton Coldfield resident: sexless, bourgeois, poorly dressed, conservative. But more than that, he is archetypal, I think, to the point where an archetype reaches such a pitch of intensity that it becomes devoid of any personal characteristics. There is honestly nothing about this man that is distinctive except his absolute homogeneity. How, I continue to ask myself, can he live as he does? How can he walk his little dog around, wear his flat cap, drive his red car all while being what he is? About a week ago I saw him out walking, without his dog this time. He had a Marks and Spencer carrier bag full of frozen food. I went up to him and asked him for directions to a nearby road. It’s quite a big road, this road I asked him about. It has a couple of shops and a garage on it. I’ve seen him on that road several times. He looked me up and down before answering that he was sorry, but he had no idea where the road was. I thanked him and walked away. I am fairly confident that he does know where the road is. He has a satnav in his car, he walks around the area a lot, despite his uniformity, he does not seem to be braindead or stupid. So this act, of looking someone up and down and deciding in that act whether you are going to give them directions to a place, to me, is a quintessentially Sutton Coldfield act. It’s an act that fits the hemmed in urban landscape, the neat pavements, the shops that sell riding equipment, the ones that sell nail extensions, the ones that sell you holidays, the ones that sell you houses.

 

I think about his face, this man. I think about his face all the time.

 

Yesterday at around 5am I went to the bottom of the hill and dropped a note through his door simply saying “I think about your face all the time.” It was written on a piece of cardboard box cardboard in red crayon.  

36. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVOURITE HOLIDAY?

Weston Super-Mare.

37. EVER DONE A PRANK CALL?

Last year I went through a phase of prank calling particular places in Sutton Coldfield. I would go to various phoneboxes (of which there are sadly fewer and fewer in the district) and make the calls. I would often call the Little Aston golf club. I would begin by asking various ordinary questions about the facilities, the prices, the membership, that sort of thing. I would then follow up with a question about what sort of membership base they had outside Sutton. The person on the phone, usually a woman named Tracy, would answer that mostly people came from Sutton but they did have several members who travelled in and the club was easily accessible from... I would cut her off at this point and ask about inner city membership, how many people they had on their books that were from Aston or Erdington or places like that. She would politely tell me that she couldn’t give out that kind of information. I would then ask what proportion of the membership were members of the conservative party and, before she could hesitantly respond, I would begin to shout a mixture of abuse and revolutionary slogans at her, trying to cram as much information down the phone as possible before she hung up.

 

There were other places I would call, but it was mostly the golf course. I put on a range of different accents. I got bored of it after maybe forty five calls.

38. WHAT WERE YOU DOING BEFORE THIS?

Before this I was watching the Hitchcock film ‘North By Northwest’ in which Cary Grant becomes embroiled in international espionage after being mistaken for a non-existent spy. It includes the guy who played the twins in the ‘Double Shock’ episode of Columbo as  the villain’s right hand man. 

39. IF YOU COULD GET PLASTIC SURGERY WHAT WOULD IT BE?

I suppose I would have my face reconstructed to look like the man I talk about above, the Sutton Coldfield man. Perhaps I would also change my name to Sutton C. Oldfield. If I could afford it I would certainly think about doing something like that. Once I had properly healed I would once again approach that man and ask him for directions, to see what his reaction would be.

 

Perhaps I could study his habits, learn to mimic his voice and mannerisms. I could eat more so I fill out around my stomach as he has. Then one day, when he’s out walking his dog, I could follow him into the park and then knife him. Then I could take my place in his house. I could fuck his wife. I could fuck his kids! I could take his dog out for walks, go to his job, sleep in his bed, be him. I could be him.

40. WHAT DO YOU GET COMPLIMENTED ABOUT MOST?

I think the last compliment I received was back in the nineteen nineties. The last one I felt was genuine anyway. It was from a woman called I______ who I had been exchanging emails with on a regular basis. I believe we met in a chatroom. The level of sophistication in equipment that was affordable back then meant that the pictures she had sent me were heavily pixelated and poorly lit. They were of mediocre quality. I was somewhat repulsed by her body too, now that I remember it. Something about her breasts, the colour of the areola perhaps. I must dig out those pictures and examine them again. Anyway, this technical lack meant that we often simulated sex through the chat application, we would type what we would be doing to each other if we were really having sex, which took some skill in coordination but otherwise was not too dissimilar from the act itself. I would blu-tak onto the wall by my desk a frieze of her photographs and use those as a basis for what I typed. The images I came up with and the words I used to express them so moved her that, one hand in her cunt and one on the keyboard, she once breathlessly told me, typed to me falteringly, that I was the best cybersex she had ever had. The very best. I blocked her email address not long after that.

43. WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF ALCOHOL BECAME ILLEGAL?

I suppose I would end up paying some dealer for mediocre gin probably cut with white spirit, probably imported into the country in the hollowed out craniums of Sri Lankan babies, probably containing the jism of some bloody Mexicans or Chineses just like all the currently illegal drugs that I buy.

44. WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY?

Plastic surgery. I also want to meet Sarah Palin.

45. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?

I was named after a footballer. A goalkeeper. Thanks dad.

46. DO YOU WISH ON STARS?

What?

48. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE 'CELEBRITY GENERATION'?

I bloody love them all, whoever they are.

49. WHAT UNDERWEAR ARE YOU WEARING?

Currently none. I rarely wear it. I don’t see the point.

50. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING?

I have a diary which I kept between 1991 and 2000 which is almost entirely illegible to me. The only word I was able to write clearly during the period with any kind of regularity was ‘dickhead’ which appears multiple times on each page. I can’t decipher any of the rest enough to be able to discover who any of these dickheads are, perhaps they are all the same one.

51. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE VEGETABLE?

I can say with some certainty that it is the carrot.

52. ANY BAD HABITS?

I pick my nose. I rarely wash my hands after going to the toilet. I brush my teeth just once a week. I bathe seldom. I pick my teeth when conversing with people. I chew with my mouth open. I lick my plate once I’ve emptied it. I lick my knife and fork. I chew on my fork. I lick the peel off lid of the yoghurt.

53. WHAT IS YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING CD ON THE SHELF?

I suppose it would be Damon Albarn.

54. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU?

If I was another person, would I be friends with me? No, I don’t think I would. I think I would find myself boorish, arrogant, stupid, lazy, intolerant, inept, creepy, uptight, remiss, intransigent, obsequious, tiring and depressing. I would run out of things to say in my own company, I would find my responses to me taciturn, cagy, guarded, blank, haughty, furtive and creepy. I would find my style of dress baffling, alarming, disgusting, creepy, worrying. And so on.  

55. HAVE YOU EVER TOLD A SECRET YOU SWORE NOT TO TELL?

Of course I have. I recall the time T______ drunkenly told me about her long term attraction to V______. V______ at the time was engaged to some other woman whose name I can’t remember. I remember going up to V’s fiancé about a week later and telling her exactly what T______ had said to me. The fallout from that evening lead to the breakup of the engagement and the commencement of a violent short term relationship between T______ and V______ , ending after just a couple of weeks. Both T_______ and V_____ were in emotional states after the breakup and naturally I was there to pick up the pieces with the two of them. Good times.

56. DO LOOKS MATTER?

Looks do matter. Look at a man like Stringfellow. That is a man that you have to have respect for. And that respect is based largely on his looks. Look at a man like Rod Stewart. A man like Stewart is a man you cannot help but respect. You can’t help but respect these guys because they turn up in public and each and every time they look good. They look classy. They don’t overdo it. One thing you can never say about Stringfellow is that this is a man that overdoes it. One thing you can say about Stewart is that he never overdoes it. He’s never crass, he’s never gauche. That’s what a man is. Well turned out, smooth, loquacious without being domineering, bawdy without being insensitive. Stringfellow, Stewart, these guys prove that looks matter. They prove it.

57. HOW DO YOU RELEASE YOUR ANGER?

I lure it into a cage with a bit of chicken leg, then I cover it over with a blanket and take it out into the countryside. I carry it all the way up to the top of a hill. Then I set up my ipod speakers and play an hour long recording of white noise right into the cage. Then I lift up the blanket and, while my anger is momentarily blinded by the sunshine, I hold it down and pour water over its head to simulate drowning. Then I put the blanket back on the cage. Then I kick the cage down the hill. By this time my anger is confused and disorientated. I take this opportunity to remove my anger from the cage and mutilate its genitals. I continue this process over and over for around seven years until I release my anger into the countryside on the understanding that it never speaks of this time again.

58. WHERE IS YOUR SECOND HOME?

I’m not sure where my first home is, particularly.

59. DO YOU TRUST OTHERS EASILY?

I trust dogs more than men. I trust women more than men. I trust horses more than sheep. I trust sheep more than dogs. I trust women more than horses. I trust dogs more than horses. I trust women more than sheep. I trust eggs more than legs. I trust cogs more than logs. I trust bacon more than bread.

60. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVOURITE TOY WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE?

My favourite toy when I was younger was an adult-sized crutch that had belonged to my dead grandmother. She died before I was born and had lived with my parents, in what was to become my bedroom, and died there. Some of her stuff was still in the house when I was growing up, the crutch was one thing. Other toys that I had seemed brittle in comparison. I used to use it in the garden as a gun or a sword. Later on, as a teenager, it became a prop during masturbation. My bedroom, at the back of the house, looked out over our small garden and into the gardens of the houses on the road behind. Our house was at the top of a hill so from my window I could see almost the entirety of their gardens. One garden in particular held my interest. The daughter of the family that lived there, she was probably sixteen, I was around seventeen at the time I guess, she used to go into the garden at about midnight, after her parents had gone to bed, and smoke. By the small security lights I could see her. In the darkness of my bedroom she could not see me. She would stand out in her thin pyjamas, her hair unbrushed. It was an entirely private moment that I intruded on. She would look up at the purple sky and I would take the crutch from under my bed. She would light her cigarette, the yellow flame would turn her face momentarily yellow and I would hold the crutch in my left hand and brace it against the far wall of my bed. She would stand with her left hand on her hip, her right hand sheltering the cigarette, taking occasional drags, thinking, ruminating, considering what her life would be and I would take my tumescent cock in my hand. She would walk up and down the garden, feeling the cool grass on the soles of her feet and I would lean heavily into the crutch and masturbate, trying to spin the process out so that I came at the same time her cigarette finished. I rarely managed to. She would tap the ash into the soil underneath the privet hedge and I would watch her body. I watched for moments when her shirt would ride up and expose the flesh of her stomach. I watched her breasts move under thin, taut fabric. I thought she had great tits. I always thought that.

 

I recall very well one occasion when she was standing out there and the light from the kitchen behind her went on. She froze. She flicked the cigarette away but it was too later. Her mother came out onto the grass and they squabbled and remonstrated for several minutes. The mother, I had always had a soft spot for her, she was dressed in a long white satin nightgown that she generously filled. That night the crutch wore away the wallpaper at the end of my bed right through to the plaster.

61. ARE YOU AFRAID OF GROWING UP?

Always. It is what I fight against with every grasp of my quavering hands. By fear I struck at the bank statement. By fear I curled my lip at the estate agent. By fear I cringed at offers of employment. By fear I turned my face away from the car. By fear I clawed at the suit. By fear I ran from the payslips and the handshakes. By fear I cursed policemen and civil servants. By fear I shook my fist at taxes. By fear I ripped up paper money and ate it like a cheese.

62. DO YOU USE SARCASM?

Everything I say is to some degree sarcastic. It’s ascertaining the degree that causes people the trouble.

63. ARE YOU RELIGIOUS?

As you can probably tell, I was raised Catholic. I quickly was able to shake it off though. I am not religious.

64. IF YOU WERE LISTENING TO MUSIC BEFORE - WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO NOW?

Before when? Now I am listening to Bobby Hutcherson’s album ‘Total Eclipse’ which features Chick Corea on piano. The track is ‘Herzog’, perhaps named after the Saul Bellow novel. There is something yearning about the track which Corea’s lucid piano deftly underscores.

66. DO YOU GET ALONG WITH YOUR PARENTS?

No, I never particularly did. I always felt that there was some gulf between us. I still speak to my mother now and then. She calls me up and we speak quite cordially to each other, but we both know that our conversations are just a ruse to hide our antipathy for each other.

67. WHAT IS THE MOST PAIN YOU HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED?

I think it is any time I see an image of the face of Margaret Thatcher. All my fingers begin to hurt terribly.

68. DO YOU UN-TIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF?

In all our lifetimes we get maybe ten minutes which are truly great. Ten minutes. I don’t want to miss out on any of them by wasting time untying shoelaces.

69. LAST THING YOU SPILLED?

I believe the last thing I spilled was a container of water.

70. DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS?

Not currently. I would like to have the dog of that Sutton Coldfield man. I would beef that dog up, I would make it desperate.

71. WHAT IS THE LAST FURRY THING YOU TOUCHED?

I suppose it was a small cloth ape that I have here.

72. WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE COLOUR?

Fleshtone.

73. WHAT'S THE LAST BOOK YOU READ?

Gareth Gates autobiog.

74. HOW MANY WISDOM TEETH DO YOU HAVE?

Zero.

75. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS?

I would certainly read the answers if they did. Were these questions exported to Malawi, to Uganda, to Beirut, who knows what answers we might see.

76. WHAT'S YOUR DREAM VACATION?

The last one I dreamed about was that I was on holiday in Aldridge, a town just outside Birmingham. The town is kind of depressing. You can walk there from my house, it takes around an hour and a half. I’ve done it a couple of times but there is no reason, really, to ever go to Aldridge. There is nothing there. My dream takes place on a grey afternoon. A lot of people from my primary school are there, in Aldridge. Though there is no beach in Aldridge T______, from my primary school, keeps talking about going to the beach. Eventually we enter a building and join the audience of a meeting that is about to take place. The building is cavernous and I am unable to properly see the stage; it is obscured by the backs of the heads of others. I can hear T_____ shouting something to me, I strain my ears but I can’t make out his voice. His voice echoes all around the hall. Other people don’t seem to notice. I recognise all of them. I stand up and try to shout out to T_____, I can tell from the tone of his voice that he is danger. I try to call out to him but I find myself unable to make sounds. Nonetheless everyone turns around to look at me, T____’s voice stops. Everyone is staring.

77. LAST THING YOU ATE/DRANK

A tumbler of water.

78. LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE:

The last person I talked to on the phone was a man who wanted to offer me a deal on cheap phonecalls. I took him up on his offer.

79. WHATS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ON THE OPPOSITE SEX?

The first thing I notice is whether or not she has braces on her teeth.

80. HAVING A DINNER PARTY AND CAN INVITE FIVE FAMOUS PEOPLE (ALIVE OR DEAD)...

Chick Corea, Sarah Palin, Washington Phillips, Patrick McGoohan, Buster Keaton.

83. ARE WORMHOLES POSSIBLE?

Categorically no.

84. IF YOU COULD TRAVEL BACK IN TIME AND CHANGE ONE THING TO CHANGE THE PLANET FOR THE BETTER

I would punch DW Griffith in the cock.

85. WHAT IS YOUR HAIR COLOUR?

It is grey.

86. EYE COLOUR?

It is grey.

87. WHAT SKILL WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO HAVE?

I think I would most like to be able to, in situations where people voice any kind of bigotry or ignorance, take a moment of silent rumination and then stand up and loom over them, narrow my eyes and just look at them in such a way that they knew they were wrong and they reconsidered their actions.

 

I would also like to be able to do backflips.

88. LIST THREE THINGS THAT YOU LIKE ABOUT YOUR PERSONALITY

Prurience, indifference, obsequiousness.

89. IF YOU COULD ONLY GIVE MONEY TO ONE CHARITY IN YOUR LIFE, WHO WOULD IT BE AND WHY?

Probably the Catholic Church.

90 DO YOU LIKE SUSHI?

If this is some kind of innuendo then yes, if it’s a straight question then yes, I do like it raw.  

91. LAST THING YOU WATCHED?

The last thing I watched was the Kubrick film ‘Eyes Wide Shut’. To me, the combination of Tom Cruise and women is utterly baffling.

92. ARE YOU ON TWITTER?

Yes. I’ve been on twitter for some months now. I use it chiefly to cyberstalk particular bloggers I’m interested in. There is one woman on it, her blog is mostly long essays about nineteenth century literature and so on, but on the twitter she is a different person. Her use of the smiley – so deft, so particular – moved me immensely. From the twitter I was able to access her flickr account (she has the same username for both) and there I discovered some superb pictures of her sunbathing on a beach on holiday from sometime in 2006. Her figure looked fuller then, or at least that’s what the pictures indicate. Perhaps she wears concealing clothes these days. I messaged her on twitter to ask which it was, but so far no response.

93. ARE YOU TOO SHY TO ASK SOMEONE OUT?

The last time I asked someone out on a date was in 1994. She and I were working together in some office in the city centre. She was called W_____. We used to go for lunch most days. We both used to bring in sandwiches and I would swap half of mine for half of hers. She told me she had a wooden leg, so we used to go for very slow walks around the office carpark, or I would stand with her while she was on a smoking break. We used to talk about all sorts of things, our families, television shows we liked. I made her a mixtape of Chick Corea classics and she made me one which had, among other songs, Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ on it. Despite this I really liked her. After a few months of back and forth I started to consider asking her on a date. It did seem like she liked me too. She would sit really close to me at lunchtime, our legs practically touching. I even found that if I sat on the right side of her and engaged her on a topic she liked I could surreptitiously remove my shoe and rub the socked foot up and down against her wooden leg. She didn’t seem to notice that at all. So eventually, one Monday, I waited for her as usual by the lifts and we rode down together. It was a nice day, so we took our lunchboxes outside and sat on a low wall overlooking the carpark. “W_____,” I said to her, “I really like you. I enjoy spending time with you. Would you like to go on a date with me? We could take in a film or go for dinner, then perhaps dancing. How about this weekend? What do you say?” She looked at me with her soft nice face for a long time and said, “You’ve been rubbing your foot over my leg every day for the past three months. I’ve been waiting for you to say something about what the hell is going on since then. You think I would go out with a creepy bastard like you?!” I was admittedly perplexed at this, but I parried her question with one of my own. “But I thought you said you had a false leg?” I said. There was a long pause. “No I didn’t,” she answered.

94. SUMMER OR WINTER?

Who gives a shit?

96. RELATIONSHIPS OR ONE NIGHT STANDS?

Both have their downsides.

97. WHO IS THE MOST LIKELY TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS

I couldn’t care less.

98. WHO IS LEAST LIKELY TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS?

Peter Brotzmann?

99. BIGGEST REGRET

Not drilling that bitch.