The best present I have ever had

Saturday was my 43rd birthday and I celebrated it in a carbon-copy office block in Istanbul working on a migration project. There are, of course, worse places to be for your birthday; a lightly armed Humvee in Helman Provence comes immediately to mind.

My birthdays have always been very low-key affairs; by low-key I of course mean, “completely overlooked by everyone.” I’m not the kind of person whose birth is either remembered or celebrated and, it must be said, I have never encouraged either. The fact is that anytime my family, current girlfriend or wife attempted to plan a do for my birthday, they found it very difficult to find attendees.

When I was in my teens my parents found that the only way to get kids to show up for my birthday parties was to offer some sort of bribe. A particularly painful and humiliating experience for both my parents and myself occurred on my 15th birthday when a group of my supposed friends refused to meet me at a local skateboard park unless we paid for their yearly memberships. After this was done the lot of them proceeded to mock and ridicule my lack of skills, my attire and in general made the entire event one of the more traumatic experiences of my youth. Money can’t buy you love but it would seem it can buy you abuse and derision.

Even by my diminished standards, this year’s showing has been particularly poor: a card from my mum, a card from my current girlfriend, and three e-mails. Parental units number two have forgotten completely and while some people at work get a desk full of confetti, cards and balloons on their birthdays, I know that upon my return to the office I will have a desk empty save for piles of junk mail and, for some reason, discarded green pens.

Three years ago, on the eve of my 40th, my partner gave it a good go and tried to organize something a bit special. The best that she could manage was for me to share a celebration with her 29 year-old Niece. This would have been fine except my incusing in the festivities was obviously an after-thought to the point that when Happy Birthday was sung, it was sung to the Niece and then, after an embarrassed pause, “and Mark too” was hastily added. Can’t you just feel the love?

Contrast this with my partner’s birthdays which are expected to be celebrated for at least a month (her 40th managed to be strung out for an entire year), garner a wheelbarrow full of cards, stacks and stacks of presents, memorable nights on the town and a long-weekend getaway, preferably to someplace warm and expensive where she can flirt shamelessly with the waiters.

There is a wee bit of inequity on the presents front also. It must be said, in all humility, that I do great presents. I quite like finding cool and special gifts for people; not overwhelming but on-target. My partner on the other hand will tend to panic-buy and grab the first thing that her hands touch in a shop regardless of its suitability for the recipient. Or, barring that will slide into a pattern of repetition. Her female family members have received either scarves or earrings for the past five years running and, based on a conversation I had with her last week, the streak will continue this Christmas as well.

Allow me to share with you the birthday presents my Significant Other found for me over the past few years:
• A visit to a shop where I was fitted for an Aeron chair (the chair itself failed to materialize)
• Nothing
• A pair of shoes purchased after I took her to the shop, picked them out and said “yes please” when she asked if she should pay for them

Over the past few years my birthdays have taken a nasty turn for the sinister. Four years ago on my birthday my partner’s brother-in-law, universally loved and admired by all who met him, handsome, well-built, intelligent, 54, had a cerebral aneurism and died while he was out boating. Exactly one year later my only American friend in London died after suffering a horrible seizer.

I only just found out that this year, on my birthday naturally, my father also had a seizer and was rushed to the hospital where he proceeded to have another even worse one. Stacks of tests were run but nothing conclusive was found. The current best guess theory is that his anti-seizer medication might have caused the episodes. Hopefully this same logic does not apply to birth control pills.

Having a birthday during the first week of November means that my special day always falls on or around US elections. The last eight years have produced very little in the way of joyous surprises and in fact, if I were a drinking man, I would have greeted the dawns of my birthdays in 2000 and 2004 looking up at the world from the gutter outside whatever pub was the last one I was thrown out of.

Things were a little different this year.

I am under no illusion that Barack Obama will fulfil all my liberal dreams. He’s going to piss me off as he struggles to find the centre and reach a consensus within his own party. The death penalty won’t go away, the culture of gun ownership will continue to thrive and those genetically defective racists in the Deep South will continue to hate Obama because he has a “Muslim sounding name.”

Let’s not forget that the Republicans, with the ferocity of a bear defending her young. will fight every one of his proposals, no matter how rational, no matter how beneficial for the country. He will yield, at times, to political expediency and his programs will be tempered by a bankrupt treasury, a crippling financial crisis and a world which views the Unites States as a vicious thug. He is about to step into the hardest job in the world; with the highest expectations stacked on his shoulders and with 47% of the country hoping he will fail so that they can say “I told you so.”

And yet…

And yet, if only 40, 30, 20% of the changes he promised on the campaign trail ever become reality we will be the better for it. If he can alter the tone in Washington from one of secrecy and deceit to openness and dialogue, he will have accomplished a great deal. If, and it’s a huge “if”, he can deftly negotiate the ruins left by his predecessor and somehow, someway, reverse the fortunes of America, stop her moral compass from spinning and rebuild her position within the eyes of a sceptical and cynical world; if he can manage to survive without falling victim to one of those slack-jawed rednecks, then maybe, just maybe, some of my birthday wishes will come true. I couldn’t ask for a better present than that.

YES WE DID!

I’ve been up most of the night. There is simply no way that I can, in my present state, write coherently about what the world has witnessed tonight. My father who, in his exuberance, forgot all about time zones and called me at five thirty this morning echoed the feelings of millions, “I never thought that I would live to see a black man become president, it brought tears to my eyes. I can’t help but think this is going to make a hell of a difference in America and around the world. The difference between his [Obama’s] reasoned, sane approach and the insanity of the past eight years.”

This victory is only the end of the beginning. Never mind the talk about Obama’s first 100 days- it could take a hundred years to reverse the damage caused by nearly a decade of Republican domination. Lest we forget that bigotry is alive and well, even in a solidly blue state, the ban on same-sex marriage is looking likely to pass in California. The struggle continues.

Setting aside my exhausted amazement and joy, I am still rational enough to know that the problems that faced the US and the world on November 3rd are still there on November 5th. Obama has taken over as captain of a ship that has already sunk and it is difficult to fathom how he and his team are going to begin patching the holes and pumping the water out.

Unquestionably he is going to make mistakes and many of his decisions will anger a good many people on both sides of the aisle: nothing is so fleeting as a President’s high approval rating. However, if anyone in American politics is capable of learning from their missteps and not repeating them it is Obama. He had the keen understanding that wining the Democratic Primary was not the same as winning the Presidency and never for one second settled into a pattern of political sloth or hubris.

I should remind my European friends that under Obama you will not see a sudden transformation of America into a gentle giant. No one gets to be President of the US without an ironclad belief in American supremacy. The tone will change, the communication will improve, some of the more oppressive foreign polices will be scrapped or modified but Obama believes that the US should be a shining light on the world stage and not merely a bit player in a global version of an off-Broadway road-show. No matter how liberal or progressive, every single American is at heart a fanatic patriot and such feelings cannot but influence the international dialogue.

It has been a long, somewhat tearful night and I am emotionally spent. In two-hours I have to be in a soul-sucking meeting and at first light tomorrow I’m due to be on a plane for somewhere. I will leave the in-depth analysis to the pros of the press and the hacks in the blogsphere but right now, I need a shave.

Bloody Americans

Let me tell you what Americans are. Americans are truly convinced that theirs is the greatest country which ever existed. They believe that everyone, from starving beggars on the streets of Mexico to the Queen of England would, if given the chance, murder a sack of puppies to get citizenship.

To the vast majority of the population that lives between the two coasts, there are only two types of people in the world, Americans and those who want to be Americans. My God, these people even drink American beer!

Americans cannot understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be just like them. It is inconceivable to them that the Italians can love Italy, the Moroccans can love Morocco or that, God forbid, the French can love France.

Millions of Americans are functionally illiterate in a language that is spoken by a huge percentage of their population. On the rare occasions they venture out of their home county you can find them in the passport queues of all the airports in Europe, clutching their blue passports and talking loudly about how things are run so much better back home.

American students, wanting to “explore other cultures” set off for a summer abroad only to spend their time eating MacDonald’s hamburgers, drinking heavily and making fools of themselves on inner-city trains.

Don’t get me started about the culture of gun ownership. These guys pack almost as much heat as the average Iraqi street gang.

They tout the fact that they have a magnificently advanced health care system without being able to see its flaws and inadequacies.

I am, of course, damned by association. My accent is similar to theirs and therefore I must from there. How can I explain to an ill-treated waiter or berated hotel clerk that I am not one of them?

By narrow majorities they keep electing governments that swing to the right so almost half of their population lives in near permanent disenfranchisement.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about Americas is that their currency is so hopelessly devalued that those of us lucky enough to be living in Europe can treat their cities like giant after-Christmas sales and plunder their stores with impunity.

Not that they are all bad. They do play baseball and I’ve heard they have trained some of their French residents to play ice hockey. They also amuse themselves by participating in some sort of football that they play with their hands and which is totally unrecognizable and incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

Despite the fact that they long ago cast out their English overlords, they still sigh and fawn over Mother England and indiscriminately import leftover British TV shows to fill their gaping cultural void.

I for one am getting pretty tired of these funny-talking, holier than thou, tuque wearing, Molson Golden swilling, moose eating, gun toting rednecks and if it were up to me we’d move that boarder fence from Mexico up to where it is really needed- along the 49th parallel. It’s time to protect the decent, hardworking folk in the United States from those ugliest of all North Americans: Canadians.

No, I was never "one myself"

I’m in the 1st class “quiet carriage” on the return leg of a trip to Devon; naturally it is filled with screaming children and thuggish louts using their mobiles on speaker phone. I have my earplugs in but they are no match for the hue and cry.

I don’t care for children in the least. I don’t think they are cute or funny or in any way charming or amusing. They are like little drunks: boorish and lacking a volume control. I am utterly devoid of the breeder gene and consider those who feel a need to make imperfect copies of themselves extraordinarily selfish.

I am proof that Darwin was right. I despise children and would rather be pickled alive by aliens than have any so therefore my “defective” DNA will not be passed down to future generations. If for some strange reason mine were the only sperm left capable of propagating the species and the little wigglers were harvested from me during the night and used to inseminate armies of willing females, the entire human race would die out within a generation because none of my offspring would posses the biological imperative needed for procreation.

I am the first to admit that I just don’t get it. I don’t understand why anyone would want to subject themselves to years and years of the kind of pain and suffering that having children brings. I am of that age where everyone in my peer group has kids and all of them, to the last, moan incessantly about their precious little snowflakes. They complain that the kids don’t listen, are too loud, won’t sleep, sleep the wrong hours, won’t do what they are told, say “no” to everything, won’t settle down, are sick all the time, cry when you pick them up, cry when you put them down, cry when you leave them alone, cry when you put them in the car, cost them thousands of pounds for clothes, shoes, dental care, doctor’s bills, repair bills, childcare, day care, private school, piano lessons, ballet lessons, karate lessons, tutoring, the list, and the parent’s ability to drone on about it, is endless.

Judging by what I hear I would rank the parenting experience as somewhat less pleasant than being gang-raped in a Turkish jail. At least there you know the sodomizing would eventually stop; with children the fun just keeps on going.

A colleague recently said that she took her offspring on a two-hour drive to see their grandmother. She summed up the experience thus, “It was like having an angle grinder in the back seat for the whole way.” Wow, I really don't know what I'm missing.

Naturally since I hate children, they love me. I am a child magnet. Each and every time I board a train to anywhere, a mother and her 27 germ-infested toddlers will sit next to me. I can’t count the number of tube trips I’ve taken when I will be in an empty carriage and suddenly hundreds of school children swarm in: invariably being herded off to a museum or other cultural activity which will be lost on them because, really, they all would rather be playing Xbox or, if they are English, getting drunk.

Children find me at parties, in cinemas, on the beach, on the bus, anywhere were I simply want a bit of quiet. If there is a charter flight to a Babies with Colic Convention, I will be on it. At this very moment I am 37,000 feet above Eastern Europe on a run to Istanbul. The plane is packed, standing room only, I'm in Business; next to me and behind me are the only children in this part of the plane. For me this is perfectly normal and I have come to, if not accept it, at least expect it.

To be fair, although that is nor really my style, the kid next to me is pretty OK. He's fidgety but so am I and he gets up a lot to see his mum; I get up a lot to go to the loo. We've established a pattern that seems to work. He is also exceptionally polite and as such reminds me of me when I was whatever age he is (about 10 I would guess). He has some pretty cool games too and is exceptionally curious which is a good thing at any age. His mum seems bright and his dad came by to give him a sports magazine but he appears to be more interested in a book of Sudoku puzzles. I wonder if I should offer him my Herald Tribune?

Right. Back to reality. The two girls behind me are using the back of my seat as a kick-boxing pad.

I've dated more than my share of single mums over the years and the experiences were always fraught with anxiety. I was never good step-father material and always wanted more horizontal time than they could fit into their child-centric schedules. A couple of times, I must admit, I did manage to bond with the kids: baseball games, Frisbee playing, photography, computers, that sort of stuff. Mostly though it was a series of uncomfortable dinners followed by even more uncomfortable breakfasts.

The standard line I get from my child-enriched friends is, “You might think you hate kids but just wait until you have your own, it will be different then.” Somehow I doubt that and anyway, why would I want to take that chance? The world does not need another unloved child- we seem to have them in plentiful supply.

Twice and only twice have I ever experienced a loss of self-control so catastrophic that I thought seriously about the possibility of spawning with someone.

Woman number one was a brilliant and beautiful English professor from Chicago who already had an equally brilliant and beautiful daughter. I ended up cheating on her (the mum, not the daughter) with a girl from my photography class who showed up at my door one night with massage oil and candles. That action alone should cast serious doubts on my suitability to be anyone's father.

Woman number two dumped a truckload of ice on my child rearing plans when, after a week of panic and pregnancy tests (negative) she declared, in bed, after sex, that she wasn't afraid of being pregnant, she was afraid it would be mine. Ouch.

After that it was pretty much game over for me as far as breeding was concerned. One by one friends transitioned into ex-friends because they started popping out their young. It became increasingly difficult to steer conversations away from poo, tiny clothes and the cost of daycare. Inside the shells of shallow, self-absorbed parental units I knew there were still bright, entertaining, politically active people but there was no way to reach them over mountains of nappies and Motherhood Today magazines.

I have a dear friend who, at 37, has one and only one ambition in life: to have as many babies as there are eggs left in her body. She is, without a doubt, one of the brightest people I know: well educated, a good job; she is actually making a positive contribution to the world. Men flock to her but she brushes them away, judging them on one criteria alone: would they make a good sperm donor? She's looking for the antonym of “sponge worthy” she wants Ovary Worthy. Believe me, the standards are much, much, higher.

Returning from Istanbul now. Lots of room on this flight and I even have an empty seat next to me. This ever so slightly makes up for the asshole in front of me who fully reclined into my knees. Here's a tip: if you're flying BA within Europe the only difference between Business and Economy class is the food. The seat pitch is identical, i.e., crushingly narrow and anyone over 3.5' tall will need a well oiled shoehorn to fit in.

There are no children in sight or hearing range. This is a good thing as I got exactly zero sleep last night and I'm in no mood to mollycoddle the screaming fruit of someone's loins. Instead I am surrounded by suits and well trimmed greying hair. These blokes can't be much older than me and yet they all seem so grown up. I imagine they all have dull but well paying jobs like Director Of Product Enhancement (read it again, it will come to you) and their Rolexes where gifts from loving but oft ignored wives who are, at this very moment, getting boned by their Life Coaches.

I get up to go to the loo and sure enough, staring back at me in the mirror, is a balding, middle-aged, middle-manager with a Rolex. Holy shit! How did that happen?! Six years ago I had hair down to my waist, $60,000 in debt and a well cultivated reputation for womanizing. I let a woman cut my hair and look what happened: nice clothes, money in the bank, a garden and a lot of female friends who consider me “safe.” The shame.

Maybe the reason that I don't want to have kids stems from the fact that I consider myself an emotionally immature adult. I don't want to stop someone else from being irresponsible when I'm too busy being so myself. I'm not talking about participating in games of Russian Roulette in a Cambodian cock fighting ring but I don't even want the burden of having to wait for the green man in order to cross the street so that I don't unwittingly poorly influence an impressionable child's behaviour.

No. I'll leave the survival of the species to those who seem most eager to procreate: Chavs. When, in your old age, you are being cared for by someone who looks and acts like Amy Winehouse after a hard night on the town and the only shows on the telly are 357 channels of Big Brother don't come crying to me. I was the one wearing a condom.

It's Not Like We're Saving Lives

Eating out in London is a somewhat rare occurrence for me. Most of the menus I order from are written in languages I don't understand and I invariably end up pointing at something and hoping for the best. The fact that I am, mostly, a vegetarian makes this a somewhat risky procedure and I have on more than one occasion been presented with dishes piled high with seared flesh and smothered in what looks like, on close inspection, boiled entrails.

Thus the modifier “mostly” prefixing my vegetarianism; as there have been a few occasions where my options were reduced to 1) eat some kind of meat or 2) go hungry and I'm afraid my moral fibers are not wound tight enough for the latter.

Fortunately for me, experiences like the above are rare. I usually dine out with a local who can either translate or explain to the waiter, indignantly, that I am one of those animal rights freaks who is a bit unstable and unhealthy so could the chef please boil an old dishcloth for me. There are a few countries, France, Spain and Italy, where I can usually fumble my way to the one non-meat item on the menu. This, for some reason I have yet to fathom, is almost always a plate of grilled mixed vegetables served limp and tepid.

I was in Copenhagen a month or so back and ordered a “veggie burger” from room service. The girl on the phone who took my order said, “It's not what you think” but didn't elaborate. After I took the metal cover off the plate I found out she was right: between two buns was a pile of, wait for it...grilled mixed vegetables.

Back to that dinner in London. I was out with a rather well put together friend of mine who, for the past five years, I have had a particularly large crush on. She knows this; the feeling, if her actions once she has had one or two rounds of drinks are any indication, seems to be mutual. It's all in good fun, reasonably harmless in a tipsy office Christmas party sort of way and it gives us both the opportunity to play delicious games of flirtation, mingled with meaningful glances over the tops of wine glasses and coffee cups.

On this particular evening we were discussing the seriousness with which a number of our colleagues took their jobs and our industry (advertising, marketing, PR). This stuck us as both quite odd and quite amusing because my friend and I are under the right-thinking, clear-headed, opinion that the social contribution of our entire enterprise ranks somewhere above termites but below woodlice. Note to self: must find out if woodlice pupate into termites.

We see it every day. Otherwise seemingly sane people taking immense pride in developing, producing and giving birth to wall-size adverts for deodorant, ready meals and hair-care products.

“These people need to lighten up.” Said my friend, “It’s not like we’re saving lives.”

Abso-fucking-lutely. We’re not building homes for poor people, we’re not helping disaster victims, we’re not handing out food to the starving- we are selling crap that people don’t need at prices they can’t afford. Not only are we not saving lives, we’re making the world a slightly worse place just by going into work in the morning.

A few weeks ago I found myself at our Hamburg office waiting to be collected from reception. Outside in the car park was nice shiny new Triumph Bonneville and when my colleague arrived he informed me that their office had just won the Triumph account. The sweet irony of a stalwart English brand like Triumph handing their advertising business over to a German agency; not to mention the fact that Triumphs are insufferably cool, made me all warm and fuzzy inside.

“Oh yes,” said my colleague proudly, “we have won several new accounts this year!”

“That's great, what else did you win?”

“Camel cigarettes!” he exclaimed.

Lovely.

It’s difficult for me to recall if I have at any point worked for an ethical industry.

Photojournalism: nope
Gas station attendant for Unocal: nope
Janitor at a Masonic lodge: nope (no minorities allowed)
Used camera buyer: nope
IT Manager for ad agency specializing in pharmaceutical ads: nope
IT Manager for giant advertising and PR company: nope (Bush hired us to “sell the US brand” to Arab countries)

The closet I have come to having an ethically positive job was when I was the equipment tech and assistant manager in the Photo Department of an art college in San Francisco. At least there I did no active harm and actually felt like I was making a positive contribution to the art world.

Today I find myself on a Eurostar to Paris, surrounded by men and women in suits; everyone is busily tapping away on their laptops- working on little charts and graphs or reports which, in the grand scheme of things, contribute nothing at all to the betterment of the planet.

Even those who are trying to lend a hand often get things totally wrong. A perfect example is the $100 laptop project. Let me give you people a clue: if kids are starving, have no access to clean water or sanitation and have lost one or both parents to AIDS, the very last thing they need is a fucking laptop computer. Do you idiots know how much HIV medication $100 will buy you in Africa? How many antibiotics? How much a $100 donation to Doctors Without Boarders can mean to the life someone who will die without proper medical care?

“Good morning, I see that you are dying of dysentery, well today is your lucky day!”

“You brought medicine?”

“Better than that, I have your new laptop!”

It is a mindbogglingly moronic assumption to think that simply making technology available will somehow lift people out of poverty. The affluence of the West is not a result of everyone having a computer at home- having a computer at home is a result of the affluence.

Put the infrastructure in place before you provide the toys. Build homes, schools, water and sewage treatment plants, teach people to read, help them make their crops grow, eliminate governmental corruption, guarantee universal suffrage, provide medical care, give them the hope that they and their children will live past 30. Come back when all that’s done and then I’ll be happy to start handing out the laptops.

My evil ex-girlfriend suffers from this ass-backwards approach to relief work. She and her friend are trying to raise money for a floating library for the kids in Laos. She wants to make books available to even the remotest villages along the Laotian river system. Can’t argue with that can you? Oh, yes, I’m afraid I can.

Just like the $100 laptop people, she is solving the wrong problem. Making books available to people who a) can’t read and b) are dead, isn’t really helping. Build the schools, build the health clinics and then build the libraries.

Still, I guess doing something is better than what I am doing: nothing. It’s all well and good to armchair quarterback from the first-class carriage but I’m not exactly out there hammering nails with Jimmy Carter. In fact, in any society which is off the grid, I have no useful skills what-so-ever. Hell, I'd be hard pressed to make a sundial out of a pencil and a doughnut let alone know how to irrigate crops, milk a cow or design a primitive battery out of lemons and coper wire. Well, OK, I could do that last thing but what would I plug it into, a pig?

If “actively saving lives” is the gold standard then I’ve built up some nasty karma; next life I’ll be lucky to come back as pond scum. The difficult bit, especially at this stage of the game, is untangling myself from the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.

Since I seem incapable of deciding what the next chapter in my life should be about, I'm opening it up to suggestions. Keep in mind that I'd like to leverage my mediocre photography skills with my lazy writing style, I know a bit about IT and I travel well. I'm not sure how any of that can morph into something worthwhile but I do know that I am searching for a vocation that is an avocation. Unfortunately my addled, sleep deprived brain is simply unable to come up with any ideas beyond “Dude, you should really, like, find something else to do. Now grab the remote, Scrubs is on” Stupid brain.

Oh, Lucky Man

Le Meridian Hamburg; having peanuts for dinner because I can’t be bothered to wrap one of their bathrobes around my pasty white body long enough to answer the door for room service. Truth be told, it’s not the peanuts that I’m after; it’s the salt. The peanuts are simply bite-sized delivery vehicles with good mouth feel. In an ideal world I’d suck the salt off those babies and spit them out again but the concept sounds a little to risqué for my Victorian sensibilities.

In the past two weeks I have slept in my own bed for a grand total of six fitful hours. This stopover at home was due to the baffling and impenetrable mechanics of airline pricing which dictated that it was more cost effective to fly me from Copenhagen to London before sending me to Hamburg. Thus I ended up backtracking 550 miles instead of advancing 300 but I did get to play luggage roulette at Heathrow a couple more times.

I’ve been instructed by a friend of mine to a) write more and b) be more funny. It seems that my last instalment had her competing for jumping space on a nearby bridge and she felt that, given her current situation of inadvertent celibacy, stories of unrequited love might just cause her to lose her grip.

Truth be told, “inadvertent celibacy” should be changed to “self imposed celibacy” because she has no lack of opportunities. Her complaint is that the bevies of men queuing to buy her dinner are too young to bother with.

“They’re just little boys! Why would I want to go out with a 28 year old?”

“Uh, the sex?” I said.

“I don’t want sex, I want a grownup man and a relationship.”

“Wait, let’s get back to the sex. I’m a 42-year-old guy and if some twenty-something hottie asked me out I would hesitate only long enough to check the expiration date on the packet of condoms that are slowly crumbling to dust in my night table.”

“You don’t understand”

No, I don’t. I really, truly, honestly, sincerely, don’t.

I’m not exactly the kind of guy who women, even those of questionable sobriety, make a pass or even cast a passing glance at so the mere thought of someone actually fancying me enough to ask me out to dinner is enough to make my palms sweat.

My friend does not suffer from this malady. Indeed, she is as brilliant as she is lovely which is to say, amazingly so; with a dry wit delivered faster and more accurately than one of those smart bombs which cause guys in the Pentagon to get stiffies over. She has a semi-respectable career, owns her own flat and is someone you could bring home to meet the folks without having to explain away any embarrassing twitches or forehead tattoos.

Why she is still on the prowl is a mystery to me and indeed most of the above ground inhabitants of at least four of the major landmasses on this planet. It’s not that she doesn’t want some willing bloke to take a swim around in her gene pool, it’s just that she is holding out for George Clooney and at last report he only goes for blondes.

My friend from the Midlands isn’t the only attractive woman of my acquaintance who bemoans her solitary life. I have the occasional dinner with a woman who, it must be said, was designed by God on one of His better days. After a drink or two she will invariably launch into a soulful lament about the lack of available men out there. This after flirting shamelessly with the waiter, guys at the next table, the bouncer and practically every male we encounter over the course of the evening- with the exception, of course, of me.

Does she not realize that she could have her pick of any man within a 150-mile radius of her blast zone? Married, engaged, long term committed relationship; at the “I” bit in “I do” it doesn’t matter. Any man not being wheeled along with a sheet pulled over his head would abandon his wife, sell his children into slavery, torch his home and torpedo his career if she said that’s what it took to be with her. Not simply because she is heart-stoppingly beautiful (she is) or rocket-scientist smart (she is) or that men are fickle, amoral, weasels (we are) but because taken as a whole, women like her are thin on the ground. Even setting aside the fact that any man alive, straight or gay, would fuck her, we (speaking as the entire male species), in the long run, really do want the whole package. So yes, it is the sex but it’s not just the sex. Sometimes.

So why is this particular friend of mine not coupled up? I personally think that she is spoiled for choice and has lost interest in the game. Whereas people like me, average looks, poor math skills, have to settle for whoever will settle for us (and oft times fight for the privilege), my lovely friend has had so many offers that she has simply withdrawn into a shell of indifference. Her knee-jerk reaction to any guy who shows an interest is to tease a bit and then shut him down. On the rare occasion she hooks up with a bloke, he’ll be just as gorgeous as her and just as emotionally withdrawn.

Not that I’ll be losing any more hair worrying about how empty it can be for beautiful people to fuck other beautiful people but it does illustrate the theory that no matter what we have, we always want something else. Even if we are constantly told that what we have is the best thing going.

Why is this relevant to me? Because my friend from the Midlands, the one who thinks 28 is below the legal age of majority, tells me all the time how lucky I am to be with the woman currently sharing my airspace: to have a relationship which is easy and stable and, even though it’s not the most passionate, still possesses tenderness and a large laughter factor.

She tells me these things and I am caught up short. Lucky? Really? But what about all those times I’m bored out of my little skull and wish that the person lying next to me were reading Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Ethics rather than Good Housekeeping? And you know, a bit more liveliness during sex wouldn’t go amiss either. And don’t get me started about how she can’t put anything back into the same place twice and…

But when the lights go out, the night is quiet and I’m in our bed, together again after days of being apart, when her breathing is all I can hear and she is warm and soft and pressed against me- it’s then and, truth be told, a few thousand other times during the course of every single day, when I realize that my friend is right, through no fault of my own and certainly undeservingly so, I am a lucky man.

Wanting vs. Having

Picture if you will, a small, hip, veggie café in California, the exact location must remain a closely guarded secret so as to protect the identity of one of the participants in the upcoming saga. It’s just after sunset; the air is warm and people with tans are mulling around trying to look rich. It was a good thing that I got there early because the place was heaving. Packed full of, well, people just like me: reasonably affluent educated liberals with meat aversions. I put my name on the list and wandered back outside to wait.

I’m a pretty patient guy. I don’t mind queues at grocery stores or movie theatres and, if I set my mind to it, I can do some pretty serious daydreaming. The one thing I am absolutely no good at is nervous anticipation.

I had my trusty Yashica T4 with me so I snapped a few photos even though I knew the light was bad. I watched a guy use his dog as bait to catch attractive strangers and finally I sat down at an iron table and pretended to read e-mails I had already read on my Blackberry. How did we ever look busy in public before Blackberries?

She saw me first and stood slightly outside my peripheral vision. It took me a moment to realize she was there and a moment longer to compose myself enough to say anything at all. I believe my first words were, “Ohmyfuckinggodit’syou!”

She sat down across from me. We looked at each other for a moment and I was relived to see that her smile was as large and goofy looking as mine.

“Well…” I said.
“Yep…” she said.

She stood up. “Come here!” she demanded, spreading her arms wide.

I threw myself at her with such force that she had to take a step back to keep from crashing down onto the sidewalk. I held her so hard I thought I could feel her ribs buckling. I picked her up, she was light as a butterfly wing; her legs curled up behind her. We were laughing with a pure, hysterical, manic laughter that almost but not quite descended to tears. All the while we were both saying, over and over again, “I can’t believe it’s you!”

We were still giggling after we had untangled ourselves and sat down. We each took a deep breath and then, apropos of nothing, she said, “You always show up at just the right time, I’m getting a divorce.”

I don’t know what I was expecting her to say but it sure wasn’t that. If it had been anyone else I might have thought she was simply yanking my chain, testing to see what kind of reaction this news would evoke. But not her, she was serious as a heart attack. What I said next was vastly different than what I was thinking.

I said, “Oh no! That’s awful! What happened? I thought you guys were great for each other?”

I was thinking: “Holly fucking shit, that is the best news anyone could have told me in this or any other lifetime, let’s find a hotel so we can fuck like weasels!”

Let me tell you a little bit about the person sitting there at the table with me. We’ll call her Emily because I like the name and it in some ways seems to suit her.

“Emily” and I have known each other for the better part of fifteen years. I was working at a mail-order camera store when she was hired to be our receptionist. When I walked in and saw her standing there (isn’t that a Beatles song?) I suddenly understood all those tired clichés about love at first sight.

She was, at the time, newly married and newly pregnant, oddly enough, in that order. I was married too: three years into what would turn out to be a six-year saga of fucking, fighting and insanity.

It took us about ten seconds after we first made eye contact to realize that both our marriages and indeed every other relationship up to that point had been, for each of us, a grand waste of time and that, standing before us now was the person we were to destined to be with.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. We both, temporarily, stayed married, she had a daughter and then another. After my divorce I bounced from one woman to another until I finally landed in England and, well, you know the rest.

Emily and I drifted apart and lost touch. It wasn’t until I was planning one of my excursions to California that I decided to track her down. It took a fair bit of detective work but I finally found a cousin on her husband’s side who forwarded her a message from me. Three months and about a thousand e-mails later I was having dinner with her in what, it turned out, was her favourite restaurant as well as mine.

I hadn’t seen Emily in ten years but we talked as if there had been no pause in the conversation. We completed each other’s sentences, we spontaneously burst into song, we laughed way too loud and when we paused to catch our breath, we stared at each other in slack jawed amazement.

I held her hand. Her fingers were thin and delicate and she kept her nails clipped short. She still wore her wedding ring and it gave me a slight twinge when I felt it. I closed my fingers around hers and allowed my thoughts to drift a bit:

She was sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea; holding a cup of coffee and smiling into the sun. Cats, dogs and kids running inside and out; I’m cooking breakfast because that is the one meal I can do without causing too much damage to our health or the global environment.

I can see her there, in profile, the outline of her face silhouetted against blue sky, red hair soft as spun silk turning to fleece in the light of a new day.

“Uh, hello?” she said, jolting me back to the moment.

“Sorry, I was just fast forwarding.”

I kissed her hand.

“Very British.” She said.

“No, very French.”

She recited the French Taunter skit from Holly Grail word for word.

This caused me to double over in laughter and when I straightened up she was looking at me in a way that made me think that she was about to make a weighty proclamation, which, as it turns out she was.

“You know,” she began “I really love you.”

Every once and a while you get to have a Han Solo moment and this was mine.

“I know,” I said.

We left the restaurant and headed up the street to Boarders Books. After taking a step or two she slid her arm around my waist and I put mine around her shoulder. That just didn’t seem right for some reason so after a moment, my left arm was around her hips and I was blind drunk with joy.

We walked that way for two blocks, chatting about things I can’t remember. I think I said something about the stars.

As we were crossing the street, arms now wrapped around each other (holding hands didn’t provide the full body contact we required) a mini van pulled up and asked for directions to the freeway. After we told them the best route the guy in the passenger seat gave us a knowing smile and said, “Enjoy the rest of your walk.” I assured him we would.

We stayed in Boarders until they kicked us out and left with two armloads of books. We’d spent the evening discovering, not to our surprise, that our taste in everything from evolutionary theory and quantum mechanics to pulp sci-fi and art magazines was, without a single exception, identical.

It was a slow and silent walk to her car.

We stood next to her battered black Saab, bathed in the amber glow of a streetlight and held each other for a long time. We knew it ended there. She would open her car door and return to her kids, dog and the horror of a soon to be ex-husband who had yet to move out. In one week’s time I would board a plane for England, a girlfriend and a job that paid me too much to leave.

“Our timing, as always, sucks.” She said,

“Maybe in another lifetime I’ll get to be Arthur to your Fenchurch?”

“I’d like that.” She said and kissed me very softly.

Another long hug.

She threw her bag of books into the back seat; much to my disappointment, her car started. Many things failed to happen at that point: I failed to stop her from driving off, I failed to decide that, sod it all, I was going to be with this woman no matter what and both of us failed utterly and completely to follow through on anything that happened that night.

I went back to England.

She got a divorce.

She found another man.

And the e-mails stopped.

Love Letters

Inside my head there is a letter waiting to be sent to you
Droll
Witty
Urbane
Slightly flirtatious
But it is trapped inside a body that has had precious little rest since, since, well, since as long as I can remember and in my present state, I can’t remember much.

I do remember something
Sitting on the floor with you inventorying kit; making up ridiculous acronyms for the model numbers:
“AIS”
“Always Isolate Seahorses”
“AF”
“Androgynous Flyboys”
Giggling wickedly.

You did see me in San Francisco
You brought your boyfriend
Didn’t you meet him at AA?
I was working at a college and was dead broke
We all had coffee on Union St.
You and I held hands behind his back
And hugged for a bit too long when we said goodbye
So you see, San Francisco reminds me of you too

Midnight in London and the wind is rattling naked branches
I am trying to type one more coherent line, one more word, a letter even
Something
Anything
But the toothpicks that are propping my eyelids open are bending a bit too much for safety
And I keep hitting the wrong keys
But if staying awake is awfully hard
Not writing to you is harder

Love Letters

(In response to "tell me a secret")

In the days of my youth I frolicked in the valleys behind Santa Barbara. My folks had a spread with a couple acres of orange trees interspersed with avocados and even a walnut or two. This was a time without fences or close neighbours and past the borders of our property lay an untamed wilderness simply begging to be explored by a boy and his dog.

At the end of one of the orchards a creek ran up into the hills. On summer days, cloudless, hot days that stretched far into the evening, I would pack a rucksack full of previsions and Rocky (the World's Best Dog) and I would set off to find the mouth of the river. We never took along any water because what was that stuff running over the rocks? If it was good enough for Rocky to drink, it was good enough for me. In retrospect I undoubtedly escaped injury or death at the hands of dysentery microbes only because they were too shocked by my stupidity to actually destroy my bowels.

150 yards upstream (which seems like 150 miles when you are 10 and slogging your way through dense underbrush) there was a small clearing that looked out over our valley. Someone had the good sense to plant a large, flat topped rock square in the middle of the clearing; it was on this rock that my best friend and I would take our midday meal. Half a dozen oranges for me and a goodly handful of dog biscuits for him. We always shared.

I don’t know if you have ever eaten six oranges in a single sitting but by the fourth one your lips feel like they are covered with stinging red fire ants. The trouble is they are so sweet, and so juicy and after hiking up the childhood equivalent of the Amazon you are so hungry that you don’t notice the belt sander being applied to your mouth. That is, until half an hour later when you are face down in muddy creek water trying desperately to wash the burn off only to discover that it won’t come off no matter how hard you scrub with sand.

I remembered all this in my kitchen tonight. Standing there, hot and sticky from my ride home, eating an orange over the sink and having my lips tingle with the memory of so very long ago…

There’s a secret for you.

I have to go now…

Budapest

The road in from the airport is narrow and lined with billboards emphasizing happy, smiling people using products that most of the residents here can’t possibly afford. In the space between the advertisements I can see a blighted landscape: industrial strength tower blocks sporting a thick skirting of graffiti, Eastern European cars, covered in soot and with unpronounceable names, parked haphazardly on sidewalks.

Hungary is one of the latest members of the bureaucracy-laden megalith that is the European Union but because of their newcomer status, the Hungarians have not converted their local currency, the Flourit, to Euros. This means that travellers are confronted with an intimidating array of zeros on the banknotes and a hamburger and fries could cost you millions.

My hotel of choice, the Le Meridian, is full this weekend so I’m forced to take up lodgings at the InterContinental- a last minute change made under duress.

There was a time, back before I started living out of hotel rooms, when I associated chains like Hilton and InterContinental with, if not luxury, then at least reasonably high standards. Now when I see one of them (or any of their associated partners) on my itinerary I find myself wondering if there might be any park benches available instead.

The InterContinental Budapest didn’t let me down. Walking into the lobby I was confronted by a sea of conventioneers dressed in green plastic capes and matching crowns. A small woman with the look of a frightened zoo animal was holding one of those ridiculously large checks they hand out to lottery winners. I couldn’t make out who the check was made out to but whoever the lucky recipient turned out to be was going to walk away with €26,000. That kind of money should have bought them a better hotel.

Check-in was pleasant but I should have sensed trouble when only one out of the five lifts was operational. My room was a carbon copy of all other InterContinental rooms I have ever stayed in. These guys learned branding from McDonald’s: each bit of furniture, every picture, every shampoo bottle, are clones of ones found in InterContinentals all over the globe. No deviations allowed. Resistance if futile. You will be assimilated.

The location of this hotel, on the shores of the Danube, couldn’t be better but my room overlooked a construction site. Turning on the heater produced, nothing. I found that no heat came as a set with no Internet. Three trips to reception finally secured me a room with heat, Internet, lights, hot water and a decent bed. As an added bonus they threw in drunken obnoxious neighbours with shrill voices, a feature which seems to be complementary at all InterContinentals.

Not that I ended up spending much time there.

I knew the weekend was going to be a miserable. Our task was to migrate a container ship load of media and accounting applications from one system to another all the while placating an IT manager who resented our very presence and who had convinced his finance director that the whole project was little more than a slice of pure evil. Yep, that should end well.

In the end we got the job done because, well, because we had to. It might be dedication or fear but whatever the motivating factor was, by Monday morning all systems were operational and I even managed to make my flight back to London.

It’s a week later now. I’m sitting in my bed typing this while a kid from Poland tears out a wall in the living room. We have rising damp, which sounds a bit rude but is a fairly common ailment of flats of a certain age- over a hundred years in our case. Groundwater seeps up into the brickwork and through the plasterboard leaving ugly brown and yellow streaks along the walls. The only way to eliminate it is to rip out the drywall and scrape your way back to the masonry. Once this is done they inject some environmentally unfriendly stuff into the wall and seal it all back up with concrete. The process takes two days and leaves the entire flat covered in a thin coating of gritty plaster dust which, I have no doubt, turns to a solid mass in the lungs.

Truth be told I really should be in Budapest again this weekend but the project was running over budget and I figured we could save a few quid by not sending me out. Mistake. I’ve had a phone attached to my ear for the past 48 hours trying to sort things out between UK and Hungarian teams and make sure we don’t miss something vita which will prevent the users from working on Monday thus causing the local management to chase us with flaming torches.

I’m feeling massively guilty about being here while my colleagues toil away in the field- they haven’t left the office before three in the morning for days on end and not only is there no light at the end of the tunnel, there isn’t any tunnel or, for that matter, lights as 60mph winds knocked the entire city off-line. In my mind I’ve just run away from a fight and in punishment, the very second I cancelled my flight and hotel I came over ill and, at this very moment, feel like someone is running a belt-sander over my throat: a physical manifestation of emotional trauma.

The dust has settled in the living room and I haven’t had a call from Budapest in about 20 minutes. The e-mails keep coming in but they are easier to ignore. I think perhaps it’s time for tea and toast. What can I get you?

A Day at the Beach

As I pointed out in a past entry, I am the World’s Worst E-Mail Responder. The reason for this is simple; I always want to write a novel when a line or two will do. I am verbose but I am also lazy and seemingly always pressed for time; thus I have a backlog of messages all crying out for responses but I am seemingly incapable of typing even the most meagre of replies.

The same could be said for these entries. A strict reading of which would indicate that I lead a life of dreary monotony with the occasional spike of frantic tension and bad craziness. While there is a certain truth to this view, the reality (or at least, my reality) is that events in my life maintain a constant roar that, only on rare occasion diminishes slightly: as if the voltage were turned down to 120 from 240

Since, try as I might, I am unable to crawl inside anyone’s head, I’m assuming that the background radiation of my life is pretty much normal. With the exception of my partner, I have encountered very few people who are able to really relax without powerful drugs. I’m not sure what her secret is but on beach holidays, while I cover myself with sun block, huddle beneath any available shade and pray desperately for an unexpected cloudburst, she reads, bakes in the heat and glows.

This can go on for days and soon falls into a basic, almost primitive routine of waking, eating, sunning, swimming, eating, drinking sleeping. It should come as a surprise to no one that after the first thirty seconds of this ritual, I am bored enough to gnaw my fists off.

When I’m on holiday I want to do something: explore, climb, tumble, take pictures, go on a road trip, investigate every cheese shop in Paris, watch couples publicly grope in the streets of Rome, or try and find an open restaurant in Munich on a Sunday (and other recreational impossibilities). I don’t know how to do nothing and never thought that was the point anyway.

To be fair, my partner is game-on to do all of the above-mentioned activities; it’s just that she has an OFF switch installed that was not a factory option on my model. At night, she is pleasantly gurgling in her sleep ten minutes after her bedside light goes off. I, on the other hand, have to read myself into unconsciousness or I will spend hours staring into the darkness, mind racing, cursing whatever faulty gene I have that prevents me from simply settling into the pillow and drifting off. As for my sleeping on planes, trains and automobiles, I’d have better luck knocking a six-inch nail through a two-by-four with my penis (thank you, Real Genius).

Hotel rooms are another challenge. It doesn’t matter what super soundproofed suite I’ve managed to get myself booked into, there is always some purring air conditioner, buzzing refrigerator or busy street outside my window which prevents me, no matter that I stuff my ears with plugs and pile pillows over my head, from sleeping through the night.

At this very moment I am in the Intercontinental Hotel in Vienna listening to a woman scream, shriek and bray in Italian to some luckless bastard on the other end of her phone. This has been going on for over four hours now and there would appear to be no end in sight. I escaped to the gym for an hour but when I returned it was as if she hadn’t even paused for breath. I’m hoping that eventually she will simply starve to death: unable to get food in past the bile that keeps spewing out.

I’ve been this way as far back as I can remember. Any noise when I am trying to sleep, write, study or read instantly prevents me from doing any of the above. If it weren’t for earplugs I would never have graduated from college, read anything more involved than a baseball box score or slept longer than a few seconds at a stretch. I kid you not: I wear earplugs in the library; I keep boxes of them hidden in my luggage and clothes. I once was forced to leave a three-day hippie-dippy camp-out, music, drugs, fuck-fest because I had forgotten my earplugs and the incessant sound of the drum circle was driving me psychotic.

Oh dear God! There seems to be whale sounds emanating from the room next door. I wonder if I give her a few tons of baleen she will go away?

Right. All that was a bit of a diversion considering I began this entry with the idea to keep it short and, for once, on-topic. I still have a good lorry-load of recent events to write about including: my month-long holiday in California, the funding for my project being pulled which greatly increases the possibility that I’ll be camped out on a street-corner near you with a sign that says, “Will network your office for food” and the recent news that my mum is responding very well to chemo.

I have no idea what made me think of this but for the last seven years I have not had a cat, a landline telephone or a microwave oven. The only thing I miss is the cat.