With apologies to Stevie Smith
Nobody read him, the ‘writer’
But still he was moaning
He was much hungrier than you thought
And not writing, but downing
a hamburger. He always loved eating
And now he’s dead
The kebab was too much for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, yes yes yes, it was too much always
Still the unread one lay moaning
I was two skewers short all my life
And not writing but downing.
Today summer arrived early and I went to Richmond park, a nature reserve in south-west London. There were bunnies. Hares or rabbits, don’t know, but one was munching buttercups. There was also a wedding. Everyone in the wedding was white. I wondered if the bride and groom knew any members of an ethnic minority. Not that I’d hold it against them. The sort of weddings I go to I wonder if we’re in England.
At this picturesque cafe, there were quite a few seniors. And one Iranian woman with silk shorts. She and her friend did not know how to dress summer without looking like they were in Monaco or somewhere where people were shiny shorts. I was behind her in the queue to buy a coffee. She shuffled in her bling bag, embarrassed that she could not find her dough. A hefty clutch of notes emerged she made sure we all saw.
There was great view of the south-west of London from the top of the hill. Planners had clearly made sure no high-rises were built to spoil it.
Today’s intake: Banana for breakfast, then a tuna sandwich my sister made me. Then, after my several hours of relaxing in Richmond Park, a chana masala curry, dal, a little bit of rice, grilled chicken and sag paneer from a curry place near my sister’s. We made sure to ask for use little oil because my brother has a heart problem. I don’t, but I will if I keep guzzling the oil Indian restaurants drown their food in.
My sister caught me listening to the victory speech of a Nazi who got elected into the London assembly last week, on YouTube.
“Why are you watching that,” she said. “No wonder you’re depressed.”
What do you watch on YouTube? She pointed me to a video of the Muppets singing what was a cute song about time being in a bottle. She had a point.
Richmond Park and I are going to spend some time together this summer. My locale is simply too inner city to allow you to relax. People always seem to be shouting at each other and cursing. Either that or they are talking to themselves, probably rehearsing for their next row.
In March a journalist called Alex Heard took the humour-writer David Sedaris to task in The New Republic for embellishing tales of his past to make them funnier. With the painstaking dedication of a Seymour Hirsch probing the neo-cons, he delved into the recesses of the evil Sedaris’s prose, researching people and places mentioned in his ‘real-life’ stories to cast doubt on their authenticity. The reaction among bloggers — Sedaris fans and non-fans alike — was largely in the author’s favour.
Ask me, however, and I think they are wrong. There is no reason to exaggerate your past. When I was 13 my dad would peep into the window of my maths class, knowing me to be mathematicaly impaired, and whisper the answers to equations in my ear. One day, however, Reuben Bennett, a bigger boy, sat in my place – and stayed there for the whole term. My father helped him pass his end-of-term exams with flying colours.
Our teacher, Mr Vaughan, became used to the man who appeared at our classroom window every day. It was only when I failed my exams that dad decided to stop teaching Reuben. I went on to study in a chicken shed in Wales, which owing to a change in UK law, was granted university status and, in time, issued me a degree. My thesis, The Futility Of Algebra, won the National Union of Students’ Most Incoherent Essay prize in 1993.
From teaspoon verse dept, soul bean cafe.
Pope-mobile, pope-mobile, to me your car is hope-mobile
That’s how bad thing are.
What do you do back there, sitting on that chair?
A poo, perhaps, through the robes — plop!
Plop-mobile, plop-mobile, to me your car is a sop-mobile
That’s how sad things are.
What you doing waving there, you’re a museum, people stare.
Or a zoo-perhaps, behind the glass, like a hippo — poo, plop-plop… ahh!
Papal plop. Heave. No-one’ll see: this car’s made for your security.
You can poo but can you pee?
Pee-mobile, pee-mobile. To me you’re a wait-and-see mobile.
God bless America you say, bless them all unless they’re gay.
Gay-mobile. Gay-mobile. That’ll be your heyday imbecile.
Pimp your pope-mobile pink. Say it loud, I’m gay and I’m proud.
Pope-mobile, pope-mobile, you are the people’s dope mobile.
Does it turn into a hearse, though?
And couldn’t you have lent one to Bezanir Bhutto?
Yesterday I posted an entry about my lunch. A burger in Kensington. Then, I deleted it. Then I received a phone from a friend asking why. It filled me with a sense of loss — it was funny, he said. What prompted me to chuck it was the fear that it wasn’t funny. Even if it is, I thought to myself: what’s the point.
At the weekend I finished a book by a well known author — it was about his relationship with his dad. It inspired me to email him:
Dear BM
I am currently in my father’s study and he is behind me wrapping a present for his friend whose birthday it is tonight. It’s a boxing trophy, his friend is not a boxer but he has been a political prisoner in Iran. On its plaque he’s placed a photocopy of a photograph of the chap, with the Latin scripted persian dedication: Reza, you can [punch], but don’t. It only cost him twenty quid, he tells me. (It’s good to send one of these trophy’s to a woman who’s upset you, he says.) Anyway, the reason I am writing, or even where I am today, is because I finished When Did You Last…? this morning and it made me appreciate having my dad still around. You wrote that many people write to you as a sort of oracle for the bereaved but here I am celebrating life.”
The author wrote back to me today. His book was made into a film last year, with a Hollywood actor playing him. And get this, he said he was pleased to receive my email because sometimes he wonders whether it’s worth bothering to write at all.
Met my friend Penny for dinner last night. She told me that a friend of hers came home last week to find her boyfriend had hanged himself in their living room. She cut him down and he fell on top of her.
“Dead body on top of you is okay,” I piped up, “normally happens 10 years into a marriage.”
Seriously though, suicide sucks. Young British Artist Angus Fairhurst was found dead in Scotland this week, ending his own life at 41. No doubt his contemporary Damien Hirst will stick his body in a tank of formaldehyde.
The other week I came back from India and promised myself to post some pictures. But I haven’t got around to it. One of them is of an old man at an airport who is taking a nap. Only his ‘bed’ is two luggage trolleys he’s placed next to each other, emblazoned with the logo of Barclays bank.
Another picture is of me, legs stretched at the front of a boat watching the sunset. It’s the sort of picture you might post on Facebook to announce to others you are Having A Good Time and Making The Most Of This Life. Bollocks, I’m depressed most of the time, the world’s a shit-hole, and I wasn’t particularly happy on that boat either. Just as well I didn’t post the bloody thing.
Jack Straw, the UK’s justice minister, who was foreign secretary when we invaded Iraq, has ruled out an inquiry into that war while British troops are still positioned there. The Conservative opposition, meanwhile, is hoping not that Messrs Straw and Blair will face, er, justice, but that Lessons Will Be Learned and applied to the quagmire in Afghanistan.
There are lessons to be learned
and there’s respect to be earned,
after five years in which our troops
and the Iraqis have burned.
Had an awful curry today. Just came back to India, every meal was fine. Then, in London, arggh. Despatched three kiwi fruit to chase the horse-meat — or was it dog-meat — my friend Phil and I ate in Southall, west London, out of my system. The place was called Asia Kebab House and looked like a station caff on the way to Karachi. Urghhh.
