A wild slim alien

Category Archives: Anthropology


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The talent code

Glitter ball

He is quite shockingly confident, and I instantly dislike him as a result.  A quiet confidence I can warm to, but an unquiet one… well, it’s always been this way.  But then I have to remind myself that I started off life as a boy bursting with something of the same sense of entitlement, the same underscored security.

We’re at a hotel complex.  Not just a hotel, but a hotel complex.  The complex part takes from it any charm it might once have had in the days before it became a complex.  You may be asking, just how complex?  Well, complex enough to have its own Starbucks even though it is buried in the countryside miles from anywhere.  It’s dark, so I can’t see the full range of its complexity, but I suspect that as well as the conference space and eighteen hole golf course, there may be boutique shops including one selling cut glass, while lying in wait for uncritical visitors to the spa side of things, there is almost certainly a reflexologist.

The Champagne Bar is a collision of styles, an impressively unholy mess.  It’s as if they’ve asked four interior designers to go to work, and decided to use all four schemes.  Strip away any three and the result might just possibly have been tasteful.  Instead chandeliers rescued from Captain Nemo’s Nautilus compete with heads of Hindu gods, and a garish painting of Margaret Thatcher goes head to head with the biggest glitter ball under which it has ever been my nervous pleasure to stand.

It’s a celebration, and the shockingly confident young man has taken it upon himself to perform a handful of songs for the woman who stands a fair chance of one day becoming his mother-in-law.  He sings ‘Crazy little thing called love’ and a number by one of the more successful talent show graduates.  It transpires that he is the scion of this empire, heir to the complex, just as I was heir to a place which might in time have become such a complex, quite possibly under my guidance and in the image of my own crass, undeveloped taste.  What a very different life it would have been.  But however it turned out, I can’t quite see myself having performed Queen numbers to my future mother-in-law along the way.

In among the usual conversations about aliens, dead animals and football, a friend tells me about The talent code.  The book’s author says that ‘“Natural talent” is code for “started earlier and practiced harder”’, and that whatever the discipline, anyone can build fast, fluent skill circuits – axons in the brain sheathed in an insulating substance called myelin – through constant repetition of key movements.  I get it, I said – like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, only with physiological or neuroscientific icing on top.  While my friend and I are sure that our confident young man is even now seeking his moment in the talent show spotlight, neither of us needs to be Simon Cowell to determine that he hasn’t yet sung for 10,000 hours or sufficiently built up his myelin sheath.  (Note to self: who are you to talk?  You need to post more regularly – your writing axons must be in serious danger of losing what little myelin they had around them in the first place.)

Late that night, as I lie awake unable to sleep, my retinas still dazzled as they are by afterimages of light from the glitter ball, I think about my own levels of confidence, and such as it was, the talent I had.  Aged twelve my knees went from too much repetition of the key movements in my chosen discipline, coincidentally just as my confidence was being destroyed by a terrible but common family experience.  Perhaps underneath the early cocksure belief, I always had that degree of sensitivity, of brittleness which meant that whenever bad experience finally came along, it was going to turn me inwards, especially with the recourse to physical release also gone.  Inside I found what seemed to be my true self, and there I stayed, in that state of dreamy inwardness.  Life since has often felt like an ongoing battle to emerge from my shell and regain or retain confidence, with ever-varying degrees of success.  Over the years I have trained myself to be able to snap out of my introversion as and when I need to.  As for confidence, I rise above the moments of its lack and pass through them so much more easily than I did.  I suppose I have become comfortable in my head, if never quite in my skin.  Or is it the other way round?


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Sedate pudgy aliens

Having accomplished our errand, my daughter and I went to the nearby toyshop to acquire yet another alien.

These are not aliens like me.  These extraterrestrials are squidgy, rubbery, unnaturally coloured foetal babies with oversize foreheads and undersize limbs which typically come in eggs and covered in goo, though the eggs of some have a coating of bicarbonate of soda or similiar which dissolves when you put it in lukewarm water, so allowing you to ‘birth’ your alien.  They are my daughter’s latest favourite thing.   It makes me think she is so much her alien father’s child.  She named some after the planets but now she has used up the solar system, the names are becoming rather more random – Clockbutton for a small green and Rendigo for a large silver one.  Drawing on the fiction that populates these pages, I keep suggesting Skudun, Badezon, Slessi and Cintilar – but quite reasonably these fanciful-sounding names are consistently pooh-poohed.

We left the shop with the latest additions to the ever-extending alien family, and had immediately to cross a busy road.  My daughter held my hand and on the other side not only kept it held but started skipping too.  I felt and thought, treasure this moment, because – since she is growing up so fast – it just might be the last time ever that she holds your hand and skips happily down a street like this with you.

Children do this bittersweet thing to parents on a daily basis – touch your heart while simultaneously prompting you to mourn the fleeting nature of such joys.  But even in this, there is continuity.  Something new always comes along to make your heart sing, to make you wipe away a discreetly shed tear.

(This is the kind of post I swore I’d never write – parent gushing about child – but well, even aliens have children, and its alien content lets me off the hook, doesn’t it?)


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He shoots, he misses

Up until a couple of years ago, I played five-a-side football every week with a group of friends, the core of whom worked for the same employer. Because the founders (and I) used to work in a building near Farringdon station, one of them had the bright idea that we should be called… the Farringdon Studs.  Or, as a female colleague of mine was moved to nickname us, the Farringdon Spuds, on account of that being a better representation of the average body shape we sported.

Playing football once or twice a week is a vent for folk who spend their days in offices. It becomes addictive, a moment of time during the week when you can lose your mind in something predominantly physical and instinctive. It’s fun, but don’t let anyone kid you that it’s non-competitive. Each week, with familiarity, with new blood, with would-be managers and captains watching your every pass, the pressure builds. It’s fun, but no-one wants to be on the losing team. So much so that inevitably there were dust-ups from time to time; but we always shook hands. You always should.

Five-a-side football has a place in British and I imagine European culture roughly equivalent to basketball in the States. At least, that’s what I think when I read George P. Pelecanos, and his characters are facing off on a neighbourhood court with two hoops. Those hoops, our goals, they carry in their nets echoes of the glory that as children and sometimes even as teenagers we thought might be ours. And for an hour a week, there is always the chance that glory will be ours again.

People play football according to their character. I suspect the differences are considerably more obvious than they are at professional level, where the standard irons out quirks, and media training dampens down personality. I played with some of the Studs for approaching ten years, and socialised with them enough to know that how they played on a five-a-side pitch was more or less how they were in the rest of their lives. You might even say that on the astroturf you see a more intense and honest version of the person, because what is said and done is rarely weighed beforehand.

So let me sketch a few of those characters. Sly Tom, the lazy fuck who lets others do his running, though you might call that positional sense, because he is a hard tackler and difficult opponent; of course he fancies himself (the long flowing locks and Terry Thomas moustache are a giveaway) but is still infuriatingly likable for all that. Dour and mischievous Sanjeev (traits that I always suspected came from being Rochdale born and bred), affects to be lazy but gets on people’s back when he believes they’re not pulling their weight and is himself capable of surprisingly hard work and unexpected flashes of brilliance. Farhan, who’s let himself inflate to a size he shouldn’t have, full of Brazilian trickery and amusement, but an organiser and as loyal as they come. Archie, rugby player build, and a mind that I imagine accords with the better parts of a rugby player’s too, something of a leader, never a lost cause, but gentle and generous immediately off the pitch. Dave, tenacious tackler, sticks to the left wing, cannonball shot, occasionally flaring temper, but more gracious than a long-standing freelancer has any right to be. Jimmy, whose centre of gravity seems to be lower than you’d guess, leaving him able to weave defences inside out before ramming the ball – previously stuck to his mercurial toes – home. Grumbling Wayne, consummately our best player, frustrated at everyone else’s inadequacies, but not apparently aware that he has any himself; by the end of the game disenchanted, talking to himself, quick to quit the scene.

Hadji

They would all recognise the others, if not themselves, in these descriptions, even with the names changed to protect the guilty. And me? Number 7 shirt, good passer of the ball, determined runner, reluctant but never less than positive captain. On the other side of the balance sheet, dodgy shot in front of goal, the tackling ability of Paul Scholes (translation: not good verging on dangerous), and prone to lapses of concentration. As is the lot of most players, it has been my destiny to know only occasional moments of glory; nothing has joined the MHFA (London) Five-a-side Winners 2001 trophy on the mantelpiece. It’s been downhill ever since.

I could offer the same kind of sketch for the Rovers with whom I risk my dodgy ankles on Regent’s Park’s baked and uneven surface come summer; or for any of the people with whom I’ve regularly played. Everyone has had something to offer on the pitch. Now I’ve found myself a new game, and the characters are all taking their place alongside all the other great and not-so-great five-a-siders I have known. My new team-mates might each remind me of certain of the Studs or Rovers, but in the final analysis – the one which is occasionally conducted in the pub after the game – every single one of them brings an identity onto the pitch as individual as his own face. And that is a vital part of what makes our weekly game so endlessly enthralling.


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Seismologist

Peter Mullan

The orange cable looped and danced all along the side of the country road, lying low, snaking over branches, crossing driveways under ridged protective rubber.  I marvelled at how it could be made so long, miles and miles of it unbroken, sheathed in its coat of flex.  I thought of the cables running alongside trains in the Underground.  Perhaps high-speed broadband was finally coming to my neck of the woods.

Before long I ran into a ‘ROAD CLOSED’ sign.  A man in a hi-vis jacket stood by it.  I stopped and wound down the window.  Actually, I pressed a button and the window wound itself down, or at least the car’s electrics caused it to be wound down, but the fluidity of the tale demands that it was I who wound down the window.  I stopped and wound down the window.  ‘Can I ask what you’re doing?’ I enquired of the man in the hi-vis jacket.  ‘Seismic survey,’ he said.  He looked like the Scottish actor Peter Mullan, the very man who might play just such a road worker stationed at a roadblock in a Ken Loach film about road workers.  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, though I didn’t, and set off down the diversion.

Ten seconds later – well, perhaps it was a minute or two – I laughed.  Hampshire is not known for its unstable geology.  ‘Bastard was pulling my leg,’ I said, to no-one in particular.


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The trick is to keep writing

Sometimes I have to trick myself into writing.  I don’t feel like it – I’m tired, or the sun is beckoning me outside, or I am being distracted by the words of others – but I know I should, I know I have to.  I know I have to make it count, this time I’ve been gifted – and it is a gift, in many more ways than one.  I have to get it out, how I see the world, how I see myself in relation to the world.  I have to tell myself how I see it.  And I want to tell you too, in case it may mean something to you.  I don’t much mind if it doesn’t, but I’ll be glad if it does.

I trick myself into writing in one of two ways.

Either: I wait until a phrase or sentence hooks itself in my head – like ‘Sometimes I have to trick myself into writing’.  And then I tap it out on the keyboard and see where it leads.  Sometimes it goes nowhere, and the trick loosens nothing more than a shrug of well-shrugged shoulders, a scratch of a well-scratched head.  Sometimes it leads to a fragment, which might eventually find itself joined to other fragments and so mosaic-like eventually become part of a whole.  And just occasionally I’ll find I’ve tricked myself into an unstoppable flow, resulting in a more or less complete piece of writing, and it’s almost as though it has been summoned out of nowhere, or at least, from the mysterious place in the mind which sifts and blends a lifetime’s doing and being done to, a lifetime’s thoughts and imaginings, madly circling like a plump dog curling to chase – trying to catch and bite – its strangely wiry tail.

Or: I trick myself into writing by heading to my wirebound, polypropylene notebook, in which the latest of my penned scribblings are contained.  Laboriously I transcribe these, and in the act of transcription hope that a phrase or a paragraph sparks a further flow, a gathering of words about a core, like candy floss about a stick or a ball of snow about a compacted snowball; or perhaps something less edible, more permanent.  Something in any case that might be presented on a stick, or have arms and buttons fitted to it, or be cast in seemingly everlasting bronze.  The original core may ultimately prove to be nothing more than a fringe thought; it may completely disappear, for new words to slip in and take or fill its place.  Or it may remain a hollow, a subtracted element, another mystery; a wild slim alien, escaping from the earth.


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Ten reasons for growing a beard

1. To more easily imagine that you are Captain Haddock in The adventures of Tintin.
2. To have something to stroke sagely when the hair is gone from on top.
3. To catch dribbles of ale and other liquids.  The benefits of this increase with age.
4. To advertise your affection for small mammals.
5. To become more august and presidential, at least in a nineteenth century sense.
6. As a musician, to more convincingly pull off your move towards Americana.
7. To blend and knit together facial hair and woolly hat into unbeatable protection against winter.
8. Obviously, to hide a weak chin.
9. Conversely, to hide a chin the size of Jimmy Hill’s.
10. For the ultimate pleasure of shaving the bloody thing off.


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Ten reasons for growing sideburns

1. To more easily imagine that you are a character in Bleak House.
2. As winter warmers.
3. Come spring, they go very well with Fred Perrys.
4. As a late-blooming rite of passage, just when you think there are none left.
5. To save time shaving.
6. To diminish the size of ears.
7. To give the impression when wearing a woolly hat of having lots of hair underneath it.
8. To look out of time.
9. To have friends ask, ‘what’s with the lamb chops?’
10. To remind yourself in future years how much better it is not to sport sideburns.