woobiquity

xiv. Arrival of the English 'summer'

Coats and hats are optional. Clouds, generally speaking, are not. (Embankment Gardens, London, yesterday.)

xiii. Me, the motion picture machine

Want to play a new game? Here’s what to do. Get up and walk outside. Keep going until you find an object you like the look of, a thing of real beauty or compelling ugliness, be it person, animal, building or vegetable (preferably one that’s going to stay where it is for a while). Now pretend your eyes are a camera and keep walking, slowly, a little faster, slower, veer left, circle back around, and pan, baby, pan! Did you remember your iPod? Twirl the dial to Michael Nyman and keep circling. Magic!

Isn’t this fun?

Maybe it takes a little getting used to (it has everything to do with how you clock your spatial relationships). But once you’ve mastered the technique, the approach can be especially rewarding in celebrity-spotting situations. It’s like making your own little fly-on-the-wall documentary. Of course the audience is absurdly small (one), and the recording quality is so poor that it will distort more each time you access the replay, but hey, that’s low-budget, post-post-modern filmmaking for you.

Just the other evening I ‘filmed’ Michael Gambon (dog kicker, Gosford Park) standing around in full stage makeup and talking to a fellow actor in an alley off St Martin’s Lane.

Of course, to the naked eye I’m just an ordinary disaffected Londoner on his way to the pub. But really I’m shooting a sideways short, sending telepathic cues to the actors at ease. That’s perfect, gentlemen, maybe a little laughter. Give me a wry grin. Stellar. That’s a wrap. Love you and leave you.

Ahhhh. Life on the inside.

xii. Of life beyond television

Here’s a confession. I don’t have a television. In fact, I haven’t had one for years. If that shocks you in an ohmigod-what-do-you-do-with-yourself kind of way, then it’s definitely time you tried it yourself.

What to do with your 'set' (Amsterdam, 1998)

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate TV. I’d be a fool if I did, since like any American of my generation, my attention span, childhood memories and general conceptions about the world have all been indelibly shaped by it. (Captain Kangaroo is dead? I don’t accept that.)

When I first came to London, I met a formerly-American lady who told me in an imperfect Sloaney accent that she had learned England by “living in the Cotswolds”. There was more than an ounce of myopic pretension in this. And personally I am not at all ashamed to say that I learned almost everything I know about the English by watching television.

A year in Switzerland spent glued to the canned programming on BBC Prime – gawping my way through virtually every episode ever aired of programs like the Magic Roundabout, ‘Allo, ‘Allo, One Foot in the Grave and Eastenders – gave me a far deeper and more useful set of cultural references than any amount of train travel between picturesque villages could have done.

But on either count, there’s more to life. And anyway, not having a television is not the same as never watching it. I mean, talk about ubiquity!

At the gym alone, I clock up an estimated five hours of passive viewing in a week. How do I do it? By watching all four screens at once. This only becomes problematic if you lose your place: look down from Changing Rooms to check your heart rate, and an instant later the whole house might be reduced to rubble, as if Laurence L-B had thrown the mother of all hissy fits. When really, thank God, it’s just another Iraqi village obliterated by the allies on Sky.

Let's face it, television is a constant threat to our grip on reality. And that's not just because so much of what’s on it now so closely resembles, well, sitting idly in the gym watching ordinary people do stretches.

Which can, in itself, be quite a rewarding pastime. You see some pretty interesting people. Like the older man with the mullet hairstyle and tanned, flabby arms, who in the way he laughingly calls for his girl companion to help him up from the bench, has all the self-deprecating roughness of an old rags-to-riches tycoon. Which is to say, he could be on television, or could have been back when that meant something.

So I’m not all that surprised, some months later, when I spot the man in the gym again… smirking down from a leather easy chair inside the Vh1 screen. It seems he’s someone big in the entertainment business. I never found out who. It was time for my stretches.

xi. Of chemical eccentrica

From NPR’s Living on Earth comes a fascinating interview with an autistic woman who after a lifetime of hopeless exile inside her own body finally found the people she could reach out to. At the zoo. It’s not every day you hear someone say: “Congo… was the gorilla that changed my life the most.”

Most of us, it would seem, don’t know nearly enough about autism and how the chemical reactions that cause it might be affecting us or the people we love. But there is an even more commonly overlooked chemically-induced kind of bodily mutation you should be worried about, because it's definitely happening to you. It's a Chemical World after all.

x. What's in other people's shopping baskets

Call me daft, or a stark-raving snoop, but I love to kill time in the supermarket queue by studying other people’s purchases. Today the middle-aged American couple ahead of me at a central London Tesco are evidently stocking up on gifts for the folks back home:

2 large bags of salt and vinegar crisps, 2 jars of Tesco-brand orange marmalade, 2 jars of Tesco-brand lemon curd, 2 boxes of Twinings chamomile tea, 2 boxes of Twinings mint tea, one small wedge of Tesco Stilton, one block of Tesco cheddar, and a pack of Airwaves chewing gum.

In Britain, store brands usually mean the same as they do in America. They’re not bought for luxury. They’re fridge filler. They’re it’ll-do cheap. Even the packaging looks cheap.

Sure, it’s the thought that counts. But even more depressingly than that, foodie souvenirs somehow never have the same appeal in the dull light of our real lives that they did in the holiday mood of hoarding in which they were bought. So maybe it’s just as well to take a budget approach.

Would that jar of marmalade be any less likely to be discovered five years from now, molding away in the recesses of Aunt Ethel’s Whirlpool side-by-side, if the oranges in it had come “from the winter citrus groves in Andalucia” and the jar had been stamped with royal plumes? Probably not.

When my own parents visited London they took back a fairly expensive tin of Harrods biscuits to remember their trip by, but evidently couldn’t be tempted by it, because the tin turned up in the family Christmas gift game four months later. Unfortunately, the cookies came right back to them, and so were probably consigned to fossilization in the basement.

I think of George Fowler: “We are all on our own cutting edge.” And I think of times in Italy or Spain when my hopelessly naïve but delighted day-of-departure purchases must have raised a few pitying eyebrows among the locals. So I am definitely not inclined to judge. Besides, grocery voyeurism is simple sociology, not the style police. That’s for department store queues.

ix. The style and substance of ethical coffee

The coffeehouse scene in the UK ain’t got no soul (can someone please tell Starbucks’ branding people that Friends is finished?). So the news that Oxfam will launch a chain of fairtrade coffeehouses here is hugely welcome.

For one day only, yesterday, as a media taster and public open house, Oxfam’s charity shop in Covent Garden was transformed into a fully functioning branch of the forthcoming Progresso. Style-wise, it's Hoxton meets Honduras meets high street. And it works. Very, very well.

I stopped by with Davide (my literary agent, I mean advisor!) for a cappuccino and to marvel that we live in a city where this kind of street-level theatrics takes place. And for a good cause, no less.

I’d be willing to bet that Oxfam has hit pay dirt. Of course, the business pundits were grinding their Bruno Magli heels into the concept before it was even properly announced, but the best ideas always attract the loudest critics.

viii. Of sadness in a stranger's eyes

“Do you know why that is? (long pause) I’ll tell you why that is. (longer pause)”

The American lady who could be Kathy Bates for a celebrity look-alike agency has something important to say to the older English lady sitting opposite her. Something, in fact, to do with voltages.

Although the weather is warmish, the very thin man across from me is wearing a coat, scarf and knitted cap. He is probably 40 but looks 60; and he moves, if at all, with the hesitance of the terminally ill. His eyes, somehow both puffy and flat, search the passing view... the boarded up railway arches and warehouse sprawl; not idle gazing, this, but active watching, with the desperate interest of one who is storing up remembrances. In case he never comes this way again.

“We will shortly be arriving at Charing Cross Station” and Kathy Bates says: “That’s why so many people here drink tea. Because it takes half the time to boil water!”

Even the man with the eyes looks over at this point. But joltingly, not letting his gaze settle on any one person, as if he can’t bear to look fully at the carelessly alive. The eyes. They’re red like a crier’s, but dry. And their unchecked sadness is heartbreaking.

With that stuck in my mind, I weep all the way down The Strand. But no one seems to notice. I am wearing dark glasses, after all, like a lunchtime sunseeker, or a stranger who has come out into the light after time spent with a dying friend. To the naked eye the two are, in so many ways, perfectly indistinguishable.

vii. The visual superiority of a weathered object

Tears of a dry-docked ship: water marks on the hull of the Cutty Sark, the last surviving British tea clipper and a tourist attraction in Greenwich, London.

vi. Of brands in the garden

I’m sitting in my back garden pondering the ubiquity of branding, as one sometimes does. Whether we think about it or not, and selective sight is a gift for sure, we in our cities have even less chance of settling into an un-branded moment™ than of stepping into a cow patty.

So, I think, looking up from my notebook, at least there is this. A finite haven of unfurling hostas, weathered pots, and some rusted bedspring bees bought from a lesbian woman in Asheville whose daughter makes them, under no apparent trademark. Coincidentally, the New York Times reports today that gardening as radical political statement is taking off among some in the Blog Generation.

Of course, my believed brandlessness lasts only as long as it takes for me to look back down at the Lamy (1) in my hand, which moments earlier was looping its way along a Muji (2), which is resting on my TopMan (3) jeans above my Pumas (4) and below my Paul Frank (5) tee-shirt. At my feet, a Weber (6), near a bag of B&Q (7) mulch. Through two open windows, Habitat (8), Ikea (9) and Sony (10) are all visible. My Diesel (11) underwear is not.

I suppose if I closed all the curtains and stood outside naked with my back to the grill things would be different. But that would be a little bit contrived, or a police matter, and even then I’d probably still have absentmindedly missed the Dolce & Gabbana (12) sunglasses through which I am seeing the scene. As now, are you:

v. The impossibility of going out into the world

I saw my great aunt Berta walking along the road to Lewisham. She’s been dead for almost eight years, and in her lifetime was much more likely to turn up at the seniors morning at the Madison-Mayodan McDonald's than anywhere overseas, but I don’t find it odd at all that we should meet again here. Do you?

Or has listening to so much Loretta Lynn colored my world sepia and young? I don’t know, but Aunt Berta always preferred Elvis.