Here is a picture of the mountains in Crete.
Big, aren’t they?
But this post is nothing to do with them.
It’s all in the comments, folks.
How To See Airports (And Other Bad Places)
If you were traversing Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow last August, you may have seen a writerly-looking chap sat tapping on a computer, his words being displayed on a large plasma screen over his head. This was the temporary Writer In Residence, Alain de Botton, and he was writing a book about what airports really are.
A Fine Decade I’ve Got Me Into
“Yes?”
“Hello. Uh….well, I’d like to turn myself in.”
“You’d what?”
“I’d like to report a crime – namely me, stealing from you. Ten years ago.”
“Well….uh…”
“The name’s Mike. Hi! And I’m a thief. Not generally – just in your case. I’m your thief. Your own personal thief. You and me, joined by crime. It was yours, and I took it and then I ran like the clappers. Sort of. In 1999!”
“I don’t…?”
“And it’s time I confessed. It’s been eating away at me!” I said brightly.
The desk clerk, against everything I believed I knew about human facial mobility, managed to look even more nonplussed. “I’ve…it’s been…what?”
So I bared my soul on the table before him – just like I’m about to do with you, dear reader.
A little over ten years ago, my criminal record was squeaky-clean. I might have occasionally taken the odd extra chip-fork here and there, built the occasional bit of scaffolding with breadsticks so my Pizza Hut buffet salad could scale heights that wiped out any profit they might have made from me…but on the whole, I was a law-abiding peep.
All that changed one evening in 1999, at Hornsea Library. That evening, I maxed out my library card in the usual way (the full six books, five of which would remain unread but apply such pressure of my peace of mind that I’d be compelled to get through the sixth before it was due back, and only have to pay fines on the other five).
One of those books was Europe by Norman Davies: comprehensive, witty, superb value for money, mind-opening, mesmerizingly written…and built like the side of a house. In fact, this is the kind of gravity-lensingly tome that often lurks in my bookcase for a decade, waiting for that glorious moment when I have Finally Cleared My Pile Of Books Waiting To Be Read. It’s a Desert Island kind of book – except for the fact that no boat could carry it out there, barring perhaps the Knock Nevis.
A book that’s hard to miss in every sense – mainly the physical one. But here’s the thing – I did. Because in 1999, I stopped living in Hornsea. I’d been going to A-level college in Hull as a mature student since 1998 – but ’99 was where I truly cut all my ties with the East Yorkshire town I’d lived in since 1982. I was focused on other things. University was my escape plan, my lifeline, my rumour of scientists in the Azores. I was forward-looking to a fault. I’d put Europe under some manky badminton shoes in a cupboard, and promptly forgotten it was there. Then I moved to York.
And that’s how I missed all the gently reminding, insistently reminding and stiffly threatening letters that the Hornsea Library kept sending me about returning Norman Davies to where he belonged. My Mum received them, piled them up, and I was always in too much of a rush to read them.
Sometime in 2003, I finally sorted through my backlog of mail and discovered my crime. I retrieved Europe (now smelling of gym rubber) and checked the ticket. It was true. It was terrifying. Thirty pence a day, for 4 years. £438! Of course, what they actually charge in these cases is the original price of the book (about £30), but terror had driven out common sense – something of a pattern in my life.
And then cowardice kicked in. (Again with the pattern thing). I couldn’t go back! I just…couldn’t. They’d judge me. Possibly using a jury – a rural jury. This is East Yorkshire, where ducking stools are still regarded as modern technology gone mad. Stealing a book? Fornication with demons! I’d be lashed into a Wicker Man and burnt as one of the highlights of Hornsea Carnival. No – in York, in spitting distance of a rail-link to the Continent, I was safe, or at least I had a damn good chance of escaping if they came after me.
But gradually my conscience blackened and festered. Norman looked down at me from the back cover of Europe, his scholarly frown turning gradually to a sneer of contempt. Wretch! he seemed to say. I didn’t write my book to have you besmirch it with your pathetic criminality! (Or on days when I was in a hurry, twat).
And last year, it all became too much for me. I knew that however belatedly, I had to do The Right Thing.
“What was the title again?” said the library’s desk clerk.
“Europe” I said with the air of Gandalf spitting out the language of Mordor. “You can’t miss it. You’d have had a gap in one of your shelves. Or maybe an empty shelf.”
“There’s no record, I’m afraid. No record of you neither, Mr Cowdung,” (I didn’t correct him, just in case he found a computer record flashing MARKED FOR EXECUTION) “but that’s not surprising after the upgrade.”
“Upgrade?”
“Oh yes, marvellous it is. All the East Yorkshire libraries are now organised around a centralised computer network called the East Coast Computerised Logical Electronic Systemic Collection And Keepership Edifice (ECCLESCAKE) which keeps everything running smoothly. We don’t need to issue fines nowadays – no, the computer identifies likely suspects or “Pre-Finers”, and the police drops in to check how far through their bookmarks are. It’s elegant and progressive. And according to ECCLESCAKE you don’t actually exist – and neither does that book you’re holding. Probably best you both leave before that changes, eh?”
And that’s how I managed to get out of a £1094.30 library fine. And all it took was 10 years and a mixture of commendable technical efficiency (theirs) and staggering bureaucratic incompetence (mine).
If you’d like to search for some moral or spiritual lesson in all of this, be my guest, but I’m afraid I can’t join you right now – I’ve got a book I really must read.
Images: Johnny Grim and luxomedia.
Hornsea, Askance
Hi. I’m a 38 year old man, living at home with his mum.
(Until she’s recovered from her recent surgery. Probably returning to York this time next week).
Walking through town last night, I squinted until everything was blurry – until it was 1998 again, the last time I lived here. I listened to someone explaining the finer points of making up a rollie. I watched as the side of the church cracked open, spilling buttery light and rosy-cheeked young urchins onto the street (and since my eyes were half-shut I couldn’t see their cigarettes or cans of lager). I squinted at the rebranded kebab shop until its name changed back.
The streets looked too wide – explained by the fact that they’ve recently been widened – and the same shops are constantly in flux while others endure as fixed points in time and space. The latter are a marvel. For every safe, sensible attempt at yet another bakery or grocery store there’s something so wildly nichey that it couldn’t even survive in York (a city that has a shop selling Christmas decorations all year round). At an inaccessible end of the roundabout near St Nicholas’s Church there’s a Fung Shui shop. It’s a shop that sells Fung Shui. In East Yorkshire. To Yorkshire people. And yet somehow it’s survived for at least the last half-decade. I’m fascinated by this Shackleton-like feat of endurance, flying in the face of every commercial law I know. I want to know more. There’s obviously a story there.
Even if I squinted, the boarded-up Amusements along the sea-front stubbornly remained shut. I dimly remember going in Dave’s (above) – distinctly remember walking through the doors, but nothing else, as if I’ve had that memory surgically removed by someone desperately covering their tracks and/or hiding just how bad it was in there. All the amusement arcades are derelict buildings waiting to have their roles reimagined – even the mighty Pastimes. There’s a hint of Pripiat about the place, except it’s not radioactivity, it’s apathy.
Squinting goes some way to hiding all that. But squinting is dishonest, and so very 1998; it reminds me to who I used to be when I’d rather concentrate on who I am now. Also, squinting gives you frown-lines. Being English, I already have enough of them.
So while I’m back here, I’ll open my eyes and see what happens.
Image: the repairman
383 Reasons I Haven’t Been Around
In my line of work I get asked a lot of questions, such as “Why are you never around on your personal blog?”, “Did you actually read back what you’ve just written?”, “Where’s the money you owe me?” and “Why can’t you be funnier?”.
I can answer the first question fairly easily. (The other three are more tricky).
Why Games Need Stories: A Lesson Learnt?
I used to think the videogaming industry needed all its graphics confiscated until it deserved them.
But then along came Bioware, Valve, 2K, Bethesda, Quantic Dream and Double Fine.
Could You Spare A Couple Of Squid, Mate?
Sometimes, I think my life is nothing but one long pursuit of squid.
A memory from growing up in Cyprus:
All around me, and much higher than me, the hubbub of Greek chatter. It’s late in the evening and I’m tired, but they’re Greek and haven’t even had their evening meal yet, so they’re full of energy and it’s making me even more tired. I drink my Coke, enjoying the sturdy feel of the glass bottle lip against my mouth. (I make it bubble with my straw, and get told off). The restaurant lights are muffled in cigarette smoke, but the chatter is brighter by the second. Mugs clink, squeak in sweaty hands. My stomach gurgles so loud it scares me and I wonder if I’m dying.
(Mummmmmm!).
Then, a plate of kalamari rings. And I live again.
It’s the first bite. I’ve had a lot of squid in Britain, and it’s always been a mixture of evocation and frustration – because that first bite, that first faintly rubbery, lemon-tangy squishy sinking-in of the teeth, is the only one that transports me back in time and away in space to an alternate world where fried squid rings are precisely as good as I now remember them to be.
That first bite flings me up the Royal Oak restaurant, perched in the branches of a colossal tree and accessed via a bole-wending staircase. That first bite puts a snorkel mouthpiece in my mouth and flipflop thongs between my toes. It puts me on our veranda, on our reclaimed aircraft seating turned into a bench, my feet drawn up under me, reading Lord Of The Rings for the first time and thinking how cool it would be to be a Black Rider.
Then…bite 2. That shimmeringly perfect world winks out. I’ve now got a mouthful of tasteless, pappy, insubstantial gunk – like raw tofu but without the charm. I want it to be chewier, I want it to fight me, dammit – but it breaks apart, turning to sea-tasting gruel. This isn’t what I ordered! Take it away – no, take me away. Take me somewhere that does real kalamari!
(Incidentally, when in Greece or Cyprus, don’t do this).
We all have trigger-dishes: specific foods that whisk us inward to a specific time and place so powerfully that it unfolds and swallows us whole. We sit there, motionless except for chewing, fork held in front of us like we’re hammering home a point in conversation, pupils dilated, until the spell is broken and we’re spat out into the present-day once more.
Mine’s fried squid. What’s yours?
Image: cmgramse