Samogotchi Writes

I am looking over the cliff again, testing myself. The sea wind pushes me back, my waterproof jacket billowing behind me. I won’t jump off, I will never jump off, but I like to feel the thrill of looking over the cliff and consider what it might be like to dash my head upon the rocks. I can’t imagine that it will be pleasant, but these thoughts while away the time.

Behind me, near the cliff edge, among gorse bushes and ferns, is the cabin. The old watch cabin, now decaying, has stood empty since before D-Day. It was never meant to be used as a permanent shelter, only for those who travel down this path that goes along the coast through Normandy and down the west coast of France, into Brittany and further south, passing Le Mont St. Michel, which hulks across the bay. It was built for the customs agents  who walked the trail, searching for those smuggling in and out of Normandy. It’s a glamorous past for an old shelter that’s exposed to the elements, this piratical past, but now it smells like piss and is filled with litter. I slept inside it once, hoping to find inspiration, to bring its purpose to the present, but by 8 I t had tied a scarf around my face just to get the smell away, and by 9 I was back in my lounge full of mismatched furniture. The cabin is one of the reasons that I chose this area, that cabin the overlooks the bay. With its root in the medieval I thought that there might be something here, something that would help me to reach backwards to my family, but in truth it has little meaning: the Normandy tourism board put it in guidebooks, but it’s nothing to anyone now. It’s an old structure with no meaning. Further down the trail there are newer structures built by Nazis, watchpoints and gun turrets: they have more meaning and more resonance. The Normandy coast are these customs shelters, and the other reminders of a murderous past. That past is celebrated elsewhere, but here there is only shame and small reminders which have not been demolished out of either respect, laziness, or a simple lack of money. Who knows, we don’t talk about this, the locals and I: what talking we do is purely transactional. 

I’ve been here for 6 months, getting away from my life and finishing the novel. Bills have arrived on my doorstep at home, which my assistant - who I abandoned - opens and pays once a month. I’m still a shitty writer, and it’s a shitty novel. Each and everyday, without fail, I open my laptop to start, to write those 1000 words, or to edit what I wrote yesterday. I am stripping it of meaning with each edit, bearing it on a journey away from the meditation on life that I want, and more towards the thrillers that I hate but my publishers adore. For them this six months has been dollar signs behind their eyes, whipping up the public into a frenzy, selling those film rights, but for me its nothing. Rigid silence, laptops and trips to this cabin. Oh my mother is proud, but I feel so ashamed. She once called me from the WH Smith in Manchester Piccadilly, crying happy tears from the Richard and Judy Book Club shelf. When I started my Creative Writing course, I thought I’d find some universal truth, but all I have found is money. Most writers feel envious, but I will never win a prize. My assistant fucking hates me.

Jon Taffer is thinking about science and wondering how he can use it to get ladies into his bar. Jon Taffer has been in the bar business for over 30 years and knows all the science tricks to get the ladies into his bar. He uses the colour red in everything. Ladies love the colour red and hate deep-fried cod. All ladies love cod tempura but don’t like it to be called deep-fried. That’s one of his many science tricks. Jon Taffer is a major hit with the ladies but never hugs his wife when he’s talking about his bar science tricks, because that’s all business and he’s all about the business. Jon Taffer uses his wife as a honey trap for unruly bar owners.

Sometimes Jon Taffer, or JT (a name that only his science friends get to call him) is measuring stools. The best height stools are the best for his science tricks. If your stools are the right height then your science is best, and if your stools are the wrong height then you’re a shitty fucking bar owner who doesn’t know anything about such science things as eye tracking and foot flow. Every single fucker knows that foot flow is the only goddamn thing worth a damn in the bar business, and anyone who tells you otherwise probably under-orders the citrus vodka. Jon Taffer tried to call the par of a bar the bar-par, but it didn’t take off. The focus groups hated that, even though the bar-par is probably the catchiest thing that Jon Taffer had thought up since leaving grad school with his doctorate in bar science nine thousand years ago.

Jon Taffer is practising shouting at junior staff in the mirror. “YOU’RE THE WORST BAR TENDER I’VE EVER SEEN, IN TWELVE THOUSAND YEARS IN THE BAR BUSINESS I’VE NEVER SEEN A WORSE BAR TENDER THAN YOU. GOD, WHY DID YOU TOUCH THE TAP ON THE GLASS? THIS IS AMATEUR HOUR”. A member of junior staff once spoke back to Jon Taffer, so he got his bar-tending licence revoked. Jon Taffer has the city liquor board in his pocket.

My artisan sandwich has artisan butter spread to the artisan edges of the loaf. A slapdash approach to buttering ruins artisan things. 

In my sandwich I have artisan cheese but no artisan meat because I am an artisan vegetarian, but not an artisan vegan as that’s too much to care about.

On my artisan sandwich I have heirloom tomatoes, which were passed down to me from my ancestors; my ancestors had wicked tomatoes that are much more artisan than you’d ever hope to be. 

My mayonnaise is never shop bought, but is made from ethically sourced rapeseed oil blended with the finest rare-breed hens-egg that totally shits all over Hellmann’s, because that’s terrible.

An artisan sandwich always has both mayonnaise and butter, for no discernible reason other than rustic decadence, and inordinate lubrication.

Mt bread is sourdough - I caught the wild yeast with my artisan skills. You wouldn’t know how to do that.

I put Maldon Sea Salt on my heirloom tomatoes to accentuate their natural sweetness. My salt comes from the Maldon Ocean, which is probably near Indonesia, or some shit. 

I’ve cut my artisan sandwich on the diagonal, as only true artisans cut things on the diagonal.

I have a beard.

Artisan.

Repeat after me.

Artisan.

This is life now.

Artisan.

Food.

My food has passed through the generations and is glorious. It is at once new and old. Time is a flat circle.

We are forever spinning.

The floor is made from white tile, shined from cleaning. Everything is in its place, always in its place, except for his pants that he has shoved down, while he sits on the toilet. I suppose that right now, at this point, those pants are in their rightful place too. Metaphysical boxers.

He is sitting on the toilet to think, whilst she lies in bed, sleeping and taking up his space. No matter how long they share a bed she still encroaches on his space, pushing him off the edge inch by inch, until he nearly falls off. They don’t sleep facing each other anymore. It is an odd concept that he feels the urge to go out in the night, to evacuate his bowels and to think, but British men are programmed to have their most private thoughts while they are shitting. Perhaps it is genetics. He would be one of those men who keeps a special book full of jokes and simple facts by the toilet, to read whilst he was using it - but then, she wouldn’t appreciate that, and besides who wants to hold a book that is covered in poo particles all the time. He said that once, and she laughed, because, to be fair it was quite funny when they were eating some cornflakes at the breakfast table; it’s a gauche remark, and he wouldn’t dare to say it to anyone except her. They accept each other.

But they no longer accept cornflakes anymore, because times have changed and pretty much no one eats cornflakes any more, not when there are so many lovely granola breakfasts to eat. It was a genius who first told us that it was acceptable to eat biscuits for our breakfasts, as if we didn’t need anything else that made us think, and act, and be more like children in our daily lives. As soon as the Belvita biscuit was invented then we were free to dunk away our troubles, like a Peter Kay sketch, or a child with a rusk. They never eat Belvita, preferring instead to have a simple bowl of granola, and then wholemeal toast, spread thick and glistening with butter and the marmalade that the woman at work buys from the woman at church. Third hand marmalade; it’s a smack dealer’s network for the middle-classes. 

Perhaps that’s why he’s so regular, because he eats so much fibre these days. It’s a breakfast that’s not fit for an office-worker though, and he’s running to fat. He religiously checks his weights on her scales everyday, even though it constantly inches its way up to 15 stone and he does nothing about it. Soon I’ll start to run, he thinks - soon I’ll go running, as soon as I’ve got the correct shoes, with the correct amount of cushioning and support to suit my gait. He doesn’t want to give himself knee damage.

She is sleeping right now, while his pants are gently on the floor, and he tucks himself down, so as not to let urine dribble out of the toilet bowl, and down onto the floor, so glistening and clean.

Blood dribbles down his wrists. 

She’ll wake soon; she’ll clean him up, ready for another day.

There is a crack in my wall that runs horizontally, end to end, left to right. It has no start or end, at least not logically, as neither end is above, or below the end. It is nearly so straight that it could have been lined out with a ruler - the lack of straightness is infinitesimal, invisible to the naked eye. It is irritating to say the least, but I cannot stop staring at it, stare stare stare, each and every day.

Hannah Arendt said that the most shocking thing about Eichmann was his mediocrity, that his monstrousness was in his banality. Jackie Wilson said Reet Petite, many, many times. I am unconvinced that there is a middle ground between these ideas. They are polar opposites to each other. There is a chance that I have been considering these two, mutually exclusive, thoughts in connection with each other too much. We are linked in all things, in the matter of all things, in our spirits, all connected, all one and the same, all made of similar atoms and molecules. One thing is sure, however, the thoughts of Jackie Wilson and Hannah Arendt should not be thought of together. My conductive logic is flawed. I am not coding my data correctly. This crack is too straight to have been natural.

When I look at the water pipes that run into my cupboard, with their round hole cut into the wall, and their jutting angular form, I cannot help but think that there is global information run run running through them, connecting me to the outside world, with the water that comes up from the soil and down from the sky, endlessly cycling and moving, connecting me and us, together, the one thing connecting us that isn’t air. We see water but not air, can touch it, can feel it on our skin and running down our gullet. We struggle to see air at all, only when it is polluted, or when we can feel it - when we struggle to catch it in our lungs, or feel fresh breezes that shudder cobwebs from our muscles. Water is inherently more trustworthy. I love the pipes. The pipes show life.

I once heard a phrase, a phrase from some piece of popular culture that I can’t remember, I think it may be a fantasy novel, although it is just a palimpsest in my mind at this point. But anyway, the phrase is ‘the night is dark and full of terrors’. The words stick, but the source has not. I await the enlightenment that the words bring in this, my monastic cell, where I lift my eyes up to my God, and pray pray pray, pray as if my very being depends on it, as if your very being depends on it. All of our beings. The crack haunts me as I lift my chin towards heaven and my eyes to the pipes and the crack, the crack that I may have put there with my own hands, in a feat of fervor that I now can’t recall, and don’t want to recall.

My mysticism is too weak for this life, I believe, as I sit with my legs on the floor, and my body on the bed, touching my spirit to the room and the crack. I can think of nothing except the water. I cannot leave this room, not until my penance is finished. I have forgotten what I was repenting, and have not been spoken to by the Godhead in weeks, although I continue to pray fervently and know that it is being heard by all that is around me; we are spiritual beings, fundamentally, made of closely knitted energy, the potentiality of this world and the next, all of us joined together in this state.

He hurries down the street, scaring himself when he sees homeless people, filled with an awkward shame that he knows he has the change that they ask him for, knowing that they’ll probably do something better with it than he can hope to do but still looking them in the eye and outright lying, doing a pretend fumble in his pocket, jangling keys and touching £1 and £2 coins that he keeps for himself. He walks faster when he has to walk behind business men. He hopes that the heavens bless him; the spray as buses drive through puddles never hits him. He is not what his parents expected him to be.

As he nestles in his corner of the bed, listening to music through earphones in his emphatically tidy room - a treat that he’d never be allowed if he actually shared the corner where his phone goes – he thinks; his brain is never over-filling with ideas, but he has a secret life that no one knows, the life of the Pharaoh. He has time to think. One day he’ll move, he thinks. One day he’ll share this bed, he thinks. One day he’ll be a Pharaoh, he thinks. The thoughts of Pharaohs also haunt him as he showers. He sees mummies when he closes his eyes.

The business men with their ill-fitting pinstripe trousers - tight at the arse and loose at the ankles – will never accept him as one of their own. They do not consider his Pharaoh life and they will never accept him as one of theirs. ‘He thinks too much’ they think, when they give him a job interview. ‘We need someone who doesn’t think, just does’, they think. They are obsessed with this idea ‘don’t think, just do’ - they yell it at each other at management retreats that they do not invite him to. ‘Don’t think, just do’. The Pharaoh always thinks and always does. They don’t know his Pharaoh side as they only look at his weather-beaten Tweed with the corduroy patches on the sleeves that he bought on a whim.

He cannot do this any longer, not giving the homeless money. The Pharaoh would give the homeless money, he postulates.  It is unclear whether he truly understands what a Pharaoh is, but he believes them to be generous of spirit. He takes to giving the homeless ever more exorbitant sums, sometimes taking money directly out of the bank and giving it straight to them. Thank the Pharaoh, he thinks. Thank the Pharaoh. He knows that he will never share the bed if he is not generous with his time and money, will never be respected, awed or accepted. He knows that he needs to change. The homeless now look at him, and on occasion he still says ‘sorry mate, can’t help’, as he jangles his keys, but they know that he is good for it. They say thank you to him, and he sees into their souls, knows that he has to be kind.

The business men will never stop jangling their keys, but do not think of the consequences.

If A is him, and B is the other person who may one day share his bed, and A+B=C, C being the perfect lifestyle, the one he wants, then he is getting closer to C. As he gets better at being A it is unclear whether A=B or A>B. Perhaps it is neither. He does not care, has never cared. He is The Pharaoh now. They are indivisible in body and spirit. The Pharaoh is him in all of his glory, as he improved himself looking for C. The Pharaoh is all he wants to be. The Pharaoh is all he needs to be. He does not see mummies when he closes his eyes anymore, but vivid swirls of colour. He is becoming what he needs to be.

PT 1: Guide for testers

The service-user should not be allowed to be comfortable throughout the test, preferably placed in a minor stress position, such as on a chair where the bottom has sunken slightly; if a draught is available, then place the user directly underneath it; if the sun is shining, place the service-user directly within the glare.

The service-user should not be allowed to retain concentration for any period of time – try not to moderate tone, sometimes mumble questions, sometimes yell orders directly into the service-user’s face. When testing ensure that your shirt is gaudy, and your hair is feathered but unstylish. Throw in some Jeremy Clarkson jokes at sporadic intervals.

When asking the service-user whether they are currently taking any prescription or non-prescription medication, ensure that a loud tut is audible, and roll your eyes if the service-user admits to ever using recreational drugs.

Drink three cups of coffee before the test, and breathe into the nostrils of the service-user where possible. Do not allow the service-user a correct amount of personal space, and meet their eyes directly if there is an awkward silence. Stare them down.

PT 2: The survey of extreme delusion and pain

Explain to service user using a judgemental tone, with your best coffee breath in place. On a scale of 1-5, with 5 indicating the highest level of agreement, please indicate your truest response to the following 10 statements. Please note that there is not a ‘NO FUCKING WAY AM I RESPONDING TO THAT, SUNSHINE’ option – the following statements relate entirely to universal truths of extreme delusion and pain, and we know that you’ve got that, we just want to know HOW MUCH extreme pain you are in, so that we can medicate and/or lobotomise you effectively.

I pretend to know the core wine varietals from all major wine producers but generally make them up as I go along to impress strangers and well-wishers.

I say that my favourite Loudon Wainwright song is a sweet one, such as Daughter, but in reality I do not know the work of Loudon Wainwright and have watched Weekend at Bernies 57 times.

I believe that all cult horror film festivals should only show episodes of One Born Every Minute on repeat, for several days.

Sometimes I cry because I have dropped the filling of a jam doughnut down my white shirt, not because of the ruination of the shirt but because of the waste of perfectly good jam.

I swear creatively and frequently YOU BASTARD FUCKING FUCKER KNOBBLY PEBBLE WANKER.

I read books that people find impressive, but I read them not from enjoyment but because people find them impressive

I have an ever-shrinking social circle and sometimes latch on to nearly complete strangers for any hint of physical and emotional affection because it is easier than keeping in touch with people in any true way.

When talking to people I can segue any conversation into one about how awesome I am, but the world has not yet seen it, because they’re all BASTARD FUCKING FUCKER KNOBBLY PEBBLE WANKERS who wouldn’t know a good person if they hit them in their mouths with a handmade brogue.

I sometimes hit people in the mouth with brogues IN MY MIND BUT NEVER IN REALITY - THAT’S JUST WEIRD BEHAVIOUR.

I cover up deep-seated insecurities with over-enthusiasm towards basic manual tasks that could perhaps be completed by either a particularly advanced robot, or a particularly well-trained chimpanzee.

PT 3: Analysis of results

As has been noted, the 10 statements are universal truths that cannot be disagreed with, but can perhaps hit people in different ways. There is no weighting towards specific questions, but if anyone admits to actually fantasizing about hitting people with brogues then hide all shoes, and prescribe the maximum dose of Diazepam, just to shut them up.

IF YOU CAN’T DO THE BASIC ARITHMETIC THAT 10*5 EQUALS 50 THEN DO NOT WORK IN HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE, DUMBASS. GET A HOBBY THAT INVOLVES STICKING SMALL DRIED FLOWERS INTO BOOKS OR SOMETHING.

Scores

45-50 points: This person is a hero, with an extreme amount of delusion of grandeur and pain – there is no cure for them, but all should be invited to worship at their feet as they are a true artist and guru. When people were waiting for Godot, they were in fact waiting for this person.

21-44 points: This person is just normal. A prole. A Pleb. There is every chance that they will live a full and heady life that involves self-control and celery. They will do fine completely unaided by lobotomy and medication, especially if they occasionally allow themselves a carb day and a few biscuits once in a while. THE WORLD IS SWEET.

Before we begin, a public service announcement

COULD I PLEASE DIRECT ALL FRIENDS AND FAMILY TO THE PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT OF A FEW DAYS AGO. I AM FINE, THIS IS FICTION. DO NOT WORRY.

And thus, I begin:

The sun is shining bright through my window: a bright bastard of a sun that puts glare right over my computer screen. There is a coffee stain on the desk that is annoying me. I should clean it up, but instead simply move the coaster over it. I should have used the coaster in the first place, but fuck that, I’m a rebel. A rebel without a coaster.

The sun is mocking me; not a gentle mockery, a tee hee hahaha, as if David Cameron has made a little slip of the tongue in parliament, said something that sounds a bit like ‘fanny’ or something. God no, it is mocking me full-scale. This is a real going over it’s giving me.

“Hey Sam, look at me.” It yells “Look at me. I bet you’d feel better if you were sitting outside, basking in my glorious warmth. But na, you’re just in your bedroom again, aren’t you? If you went to Regent’s Park today, you’d see some girls and you could eat some olives; you could use that Fortnum and Mason wine-cooler. But na. You’re at your desk again. What are you doing? Writing something? That’s a mugs game and no mistake. Write in a café, in a moleskine notebook like the prick you are.”

I hate that smug cockney bastard of a sun. Jesus Christ, the sun’s now a cockney to me. I need to leave this room again. Maybe get dressed.

I’ve changed my Facebook presence, made it look like I’m more together than I am. I’ve untagged all the photos of when I was a bit fatter, when my shirts bulged around a porky midriff; all examples of shirt buttons straining are now not connected to me. I have taken some arty shots of coffee I brewed, and have put the ‘warm’ filter on them, so it looks like I took the photos in the 60s. I am considering putting the coffee as my profile picture. I can look mysterious and arty at the same time. Girls will want to be me, boys will want to be with me. It’s the circle of life.

I don’t really want to change my handle though, not really. Some real time and effort put me in the place where I chose a good little pun and FUCK ME I AM STICKING WITH IT. I have a certain brand awareness to uphold. But still, despite this, my seeming togetherness, in truth I’m going bananas. I haven’t left my room for days, with that bastard of a sun outside, shining in. It is becoming effort to dress, or eat. My hipflask is empty, an emergency booze supply that I keep in my desk drawer. God knows when I emptied that. I won’t refill it now. The water in my glass has gone weird and bubbly.

Will I get to a time when I don’t see my friends’ lives emblazoned on the internet for all to see, their parties and their babies and their weddings and their champagne and their FUN FUN FUN and not feel jealous? Will there be a time when mental hygiene is not what I worry about, when I can start that drink and not feel the urge to go for days, spinning carelessly into oblivion, hoping my friends won’t catch me still drunk on a Sunday morning humming Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat to myself again, grinning inanely and still slightly blurry?

6:05am

I am awoken with a startling desire to throw up, which I immediately quash: I am proud of my ability not to throw up due to this self-inflicted malady. I watch action films that require no explanation and contain only a hail of gun fire. I feel ashamed.

8:12am

I had fallen asleep during my bi-annual viewing of Taken, at around the section where Liam Neeson tortures an unnamed man of middle-Eastern descent for kidnapping his daughter. I have not seen Taken 2. I worry if the fact that this headache is only abated by watching people being punched is, in fact, a symptom of some kind of mental imbalance. I feel existential and need coffee.

10:57am

The sun is shining outside, a form of dubious sensory overload; I cannot face seeing the sun and wish that it had maybe appeared when I didn’t have a headache i.e. yesterday. Despite my best attempts, ESP has not yet created coffee. I will have to try teaching myself mid-level psychic abilities another time.

11:07am

WHY DOES AL PACINO KEEP SHOUTING?

11:32am

Good god – people on Twitter seem to be actually doing something with their day; someone’s even going on a picnic. What a COCK. Does life exist outside of these four walls? I hear the hurble-burble of my housemates talking but I am worried that they are in fact a fiction, a complex back-story created by the CIA to subjugate me.

11:35am

I should watch fewer films about the CIA.

12:09pm

The clock has passed into the afternoon. HAPPY FUCKING AFTERNOON. I really must awaken, try to appear normal. I am worried that if I walk out of the house, people will know about me, about my life, about what I did last night and how I feel right now. I worry that they’ll talk behind corners about me, will judge my clothes, which are sure to be haphazard.

12:37pm

Heavenly shower, heavenly power shower: what a blessing you are. I feel invigorated, with mint shower gel tingling in places that sometimes need a good fucking tingle. I may be able to face the world now, to be spell-binding. I could be the greatest fucking human who ever lived. You will cower in my shadow, world, as I won. I FUCKING WON. I can beat anything. I can tear up phone directories with my bare hands. I can punch holes in walls. If Liam Neeson challenged me to a fight, then I’d be sure to win. I could be the greatest slam poet who has ever lived.

12:59pm

I need a nap.

It would be so easy to say that this piece is my swan-song, my last piece before diving into the black pool of writing has-beens and failures. Oh yes, that would be so easy to say. In truth, it is these pieces that are sustaining me right now, moving me into a place beyond mere experience, mere real-life; in truth, these pieces are what separates me from falling into a pit, a commuting pit, a pit of despair where I get on to the same tram every single fucking day, go to the gym, come home and eat the same fucking meals, go to bed. Sleep, blessed relief.

I hate the gym, hate what it does to me; I hate the aches and pains; I hate the people there with their ever-toning abs and their lift-lift-lifting of weights, going up-down, up-down, motions as brainless as an executive toy. When I complain of the gym, the aches and pains, people say ‘oh, but it’s so good for you, the aches and pains are a good thing, show your body is doing something good’ and I KNOW I KNOW that this cannot be good for me. I know that before I went to the gym I didn’t have these pains, had a larger stomach but stronger shins. But still, the mindless drudgery of it, the meaninglessness of self-improvement in a world where, at some point, it will be the very epitome of meaninglessness, at least fills time, gives me something to distract myself from the click-click-clicking of my mind.

Still, despite my hatred of the gym, and the tram - the tram with its heat, the squashed-up scent of hundreds of body odours mixed together into foul brews, its delays and annoyances and free newspapers lining the fucking floor – I continue to do them, each and every day. I find the penance appeases my soul.

This is why I write: not for YOU but for ME. I appreciate validation, appreciate that my words typed onto a page does give other people some pleasure; but I WILL CONTINUE TO WRITE. My life is not a real-life Silver Linings Playbook: there is no instant cure, no instant fix. I cannot become better by dancing off of my stresses, my woes. I try, I struggle, I get better, I self-improve. Writing is where I come to shed those loads, to try and at least dish-out the crazy  before it becomes part of the day to day.

It was on the 10th day after the War that he became a Monster. The Great War: the War that saw the death of millions of young and old, people with lives and thoughts and families - the Great War that could perceivably mark the end of days - now got ignored. The War itself became quickly forgotten by those few people who were left, those who were busy surviving among the wreckage of the lost world, people left trying to hunt and gather, fish and weed, construct and care for each other, forgotten in favour of their new favourite conversation: how he had become a Monster.

They talked about a movie, although they’d forgotten the name of the movie –there having been a Great War and all – a movie which saw a group of monsters accidentally adopt a small child, a movie that had been rendered in glorious computer graphics, something unimaginable now.

“But in that movie? What was its name again? The movie about the monsters who adopt the kid? Well, he’s not a monster like in that movie – those monsters were nice, and one of them looked like a bear; he’s hideous, and well, he’s a bit of a bastard. WHAT WAS THE NAME OF THAT MOVIE AGAIN?” they said to each other, time and again, as the days drew shorter, and the wolves started to consume their young.

The cold was setting in, not a Nuclear Winter - the War had never been Nuclear, and had seen no side press that RED BUTTON, the RED BUTTON that decides fates – but the real winter, the bitter cold that has decided the fate of humanity for generations: cold in which none prosper, and sooner or later all perish.

Still, despite the cold they were obsessed with how he had become a monster. One member of the group was a philosopher, a writer, one who remembered the skills of logic, one who knew many of the great works of literature.

“Well” he said, haughtily and often, “Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa woke up spontaneously as a cockroach, and Salman Rushdie wrote the Satanic Verses, in which the protagonist had spontaneously transformed into a Demon. Perhaps those chaps were on to something, perhaps there is a real dynamic at play within the world, one that can change man into beast and vice-versa’.

People tended to ignore the philosopher: after the Great War, there was no real need for a philosopher, what with their group getting smaller and smaller thanks to the night-wolves, and the cold, and now their unique desire to eat one another. They began small on this new grotesque activity, cutting off small, frozen chunks, a casserole dice of human flesh that they sucked moisture out of, chewed quickly and swallowed even faster; the activity soon started to spiral, with one of the more harrowing uses of time for the group being their daily chore of deciding who to kill and eat and their discussion in the aftermath of how they would cook them if they had access to either fire or utensils. The philosopher was first to go.

“You can stick your fucking Kafka anecdotes up your arse” yelled one of them, while stabbing him brutally in the sternum with a particularly sharp rock.

The monster looked on at this bemused – even when he wasn’t a monster he had never been overtly popular, had never been the life and soul of the party. Sometimes he thought of looking at them, staring directly into their eyes and saying “And you call me a monster”, like an afternoon special about bullying, rather than a low-rent version of Soylent Green. But he didn’t, because the Monster was not one of them, not truly: he camped near their camp, in a cave where he alone had a fire that they were all SO JEALOUS of; they recognised his existence, but never spoke to him, only about him, The Man that became The Monster on the 10th day.

It was on the 21st day that the last of them died, a Civil Engineer from Norbiton, a kindly man who had previously ignored the Monster. It was the night-wolves, the voracious beasts that had appeared, as if by magic, during The Great War: many thought that they were domestic dogs who had stepped back in evolution, gone back into the feral state. The Monster left his cave to watch, to stare directly into their eyes while the Wolves killed him slowly, savouring every bite, tasting every morsel – they seemed to kill for flavour and texture, not simply the pleasure of the quick death. It was agonising for all those who were killed by the Wolves.

Before we start: a Public Information Message

Be aware that I am egotistical enough to take real people, real situations and my real life, wash it of meaning, change circumstances and people, make myself look and sound better, feel better; sometimes I make myself sound worse, make myself into a monster, or a confused figure, confused by the world, an outsider, a pariah. Hell, sometimes I make myself into a Messiah: surround myself with willing disciples, people who know me, love me, feel strong emotions for me but do not hang on my every word, who do not feel that they need to follow me over the top into a No Mans Land of doubt and self-consciousness. What I of course mean by this is that my lines of autobiography and fiction are sometimes blurred; much of my fiction is something that can be attributed to the real people in my life: for example, if I say that my mother recently said (while giving me money): ‘Here -take this, I love you now, and you’re thin now’, I can honestly make that sentence sound like whatever I want it to: genuine love; scathing on her part; scathing on my part. It was genuinely an act of love, and that we all know, deep down. I would therefore like you all to suspend your disbelief, to not get offended; if you know me, please do not offended or worried; if you don’t know me then feel free to get as fucking offended as you fucking well want – I couldn’t give two shits. I can give two shits please don’t leave me NEVER LEAVE ME I NEED YOU: the night is dark and full of terror (I STOLE THAT LINE). Basically though, I may acknowledge some real names at some point, perhaps not now, but soon. All readers, please just realise that any people who may or may not appear are but ciphers of my own insecurity, repurposed for my own aim, and not representing a reality. Also, be aware that I am also a cipher in my work: I exaggerate, I make comedic asides, I represent all of my fears about this world, but also none of them. I am, to put it bluntly, not this person BUT exactly this person.

NB: If I mention Kirsty THEN IT’S ALL TRUE.

And so we can begin on tonight’s topic: Being (just about) 30, and having friends.

I’d like to talk about love; not the love between a man and a woman, not the typical erotic love, the love of which movies are made and Badly Drawn Boy sings about; not the love that I torture myself with weekly as penance, watching hour after hour of Romantic Comedies so formulaic that they are tragic, but make me cry until I cannot breathe, until I feel such strong emotion that I just want to pass out. I don’t want to talk about the last time I felt eros, when that love stuttered into a year of bitter recriminations and sadness, destructive on both our parts - a blessed relief for both of us when it broke down; instead I want to talk about friendship, that mixture of philias and agape that sustains me, bubbles under the surface, sometimes erupting to the fore with such strong force that it can take me by surprise. I feel such strong emotions for my friends, such attachment that all I can do is shudder. And tonight, I want to talk about them. Well, as I explained, I more want to talk about ME, because I love to talk about ME, but I will talk about US while I talk about ME. Please, please be aware that they are all much nicer, more secure, more pleasant and personable, less awkward, less awful than me.

There was a time, many years ago, well not so many years ago, let’s say 8 years ago - before I crashed headfirst into 30, a car-wreck of a man - when I was briefly culturally relevant, when I was, for want of a better word:  ‘cool’. I guess Kerouac would have perhaps called me a ‘hepcat’ but he also said a lot about dharma and jazz and the universe, and most of it was godforsaken, pointless, unedited shit. I don’t even know why I brought him up.

I lived in Devon at the time. It is unclear why my living in Devon is important in any way, but it sets us up, gives us what is known as the Mise en scène, lets you the reader know where I was, how I am what I claimed to be. I lived in Devon, in a house that had previously been a restaurant, a palimpsest still full of that previous existence; a house with 2 dining tables in all of the rooms; where the downstairs bathroom still bore the sign ‘Gents’; where there were hundreds of FUCKING COAT HOOKS that we snagged our coats on when we all came in drunk and tried to use the kitchen. I no longer take that risk, the risk of cooking when drunk, the risk of putting match to gas ring even though it could blow us all to smithereens or we could die of carbon monoxide poisoning: now I eat sandwiches and wake up in a bed full of crumbs that I carefully vacuum the next day, wincing with the pain of the noise and the hellish hangover that we all know get worse as our bodies start to fail.

I lived with friends, my best friends, the friends I turn to when I have problems, the friends who I still spend New Years with when I can, who I now go ‘wasn’t that just the best FUCKING year?’ at when I am drunk and maudlin and wish I was 22 again. We were heroes; we were Gods; we were the Justice League. We jumped skyscrapers. We positively oozed good health and youthful vigour. Both men and women wanted to be with us AND to be us, to be accepted into our community. We were a fucking Tommy Hilfiger advert.

 It was the year we honed our styles, got completely out of the University bubble, stopped wearing fleeces and hoodies; threw away our worst t-shirts. I began to watch my weight slightly, chose a skinnier fit in the leg on my trousers and started to wear glasses. I organised book clubs that no one came to. I wrote ‘zines that lampooned other ‘zines. I was broadly accepted as a man of cultural weight: I wore the t-shirts of bands and people said ‘who is that band?’ and I told them, and then they thanked me weeks later. I got free entry to most concerts.

It is sad now to admit that I look so fondly back at that year, with all of my problems, with my mistakes and bad attitude. I imagine that many of the people I shared that house with, people now married, one with a child, people settled and secure probably do not feel that strongly about it. They probably think ‘that was a pleasant year’; they have grown older, not in Arrested Development like me, have got lives that don’t revolve around work and Twitter. It is only writing this now that I realise just how embroidered my past has become, just how many thoughts and facts have been pushed out of my mind or pushed forward, just how flowery my view of the past has become. There is a solid chance that none of this ever happened, so fictional has it become. But, to be honest, I prefer my view of the non-existent past to the ever-annoying present. In my past I did not get rampantly annoyed, cough and splutter with righteous indignation, whenever Grant Shapps MP appears on my TV screen; in my past, I could stay up late without worrying about the consequence that it might have on my working day and my never fulfilled need to keep re-sizing graphs and charts until they are just right;  in my past I could converse with the people that I love the most without worrying if they were just starting to hate me a little bit, that they wanted to start to ignore me and let me fester, whilst I cry while watching Definitely, Maybe for the tenth time.

 I feel as if my brain is starting to leave me, now I am at this milestone age. It could be purely imaginary, just a vague sense, social pressure to become older, to act older, to appear MATURE. Or it could be a biological trigger, pre-programmed ­- not by a deity because I don’t believe in them - by a universe, to show our weakness, to show the way our bodies and minds interact, forever linked in a tussle for supremacy that, at the end of the day they both lose. I really think that I need to get a Brain Training game for my Nintendo DS.

I thought that I would write down some feelings about you my niece, put pen to paper, or more correctly, fingers to keyboard, to write some words that may well just affect the entire course of my life. They probably won’t affect my life, my life will probably remain unchanged and still slightly irrelevant in the grand course of a world history that saw an explosion of matter, and dark matter, atoms and neutrons and whatever else expand outwards over the course of billions of years and gradually settle down, create shape, create conscience, into this being that curiously was called Samuel, but who sometimes forgets that fact. But, I like to think that they may affect something or other, and may hold meaning, even if only for you.

I want you to read this, Ava, in the future, perhaps and know that I’m writing this so that:

When I am inevitably dead and gone - what a morbid thought to start with - as I am sure to be at some point, you will think one of the following sentiments: a. Hey my uncle died old but at some point he was young and free and had all his own teeth and had a rich interior life that meant he put his fingers to a keyboard (who knows, when you’re older we may not have keyboards and just write stuff with our minds or something) and wrote some thoughts and published them online in the grand cache of an internet that may cease to exist one day. b. Hey my uncle died young, but he seemed like this pretty cool guy and even though he sat sullenly in a corner sometimes reading books and drinking whisky and generally being a good-for-nothing, he had a rich interior life that I knew nothing about and I should have talked to him about philosophy and theology and geometry and all that stuff.

If I am still alive, you may think: ‘Hey my uncle seems like a pretty chill guy. I should definitely go and pour him a whisky, and listen to him as he extols the virtue of American shoe-gaze indie that is so un-cool these days that it’s practically tragic.

When I publish this online, a nice girl or woman may read it, and this may lead to some thoughts on their part where they think: ‘that Sam is lovely, and I just really want to date him’. Yes, Ava: you are a part of my life, but I am also a man who uses your very existence to try and maybe meet a person who may one day be part of your life, and who I can have some spoons with. I am selfish like that.

At the moment you are nearly one year old, just a week away from that grand old year where you will start to walk and run about, unbalanced, constantly about to fall over, only powered by inertia and gravity. You will be Newtonian laws incarnate. At the moment you can’t do that though, you can’t yet walk. You crawl. Faster than a rocket. You can get from one side of the room to another in seconds and we look away for a moment and we all panic and yell and say ‘WHERE’S AVA GONE?’ and you are trying to eat coal from the fire place or are in the kitchen and one of us has to get up and pick you up and move you back into the centre of the room where you’ll be SAFE. Sometimes we don’t pick you up, we just pull you over by your feet and you find that HILARIOUS and you just laugh and laugh and laugh and make this little demon face that we all love.

Your entire existence is currently defined in its potentiality. You are a person, growing, becoming older, getting bigger, filling out new clothes and growing your hair out. But you are still a potential person, you make noises that sound like speech, an endless burble of ‘bah bah bah bah bah bah’ mixed with squeals and laughter, but it’s not yet speech. You drag yourself up on furniture and you can lean down and pick up the cat rattle that squeaks when you squeeze it: but it’s not yet standing. It’s not yet full rational thoughts and motions, but we KNOW: we know that in all of those actions there is a potentiality to become an adult. When you rocket across the room we all feel old, and know that one day you’ll be older and not be Baby Ava any more but Grown-up Ava who is a teacher or a poet or a doctor or whatever the hell you want to be.

I am not going to get too soppy, that’s a big turn-off for the readership of this letter, Ava – I don’t want people to cry but feel LOVE – but you will one day be something that we aren’t and won’t be defined by us. You will remember this house, the house where I grew up, and your mother grew up, and you’ll remember the tiny room that I was forever cursed with by your grandmother. You’ll remember laughter and television and fish pies and wine and lasagne and noise. You’ll remember how sometimes we get stressed with each other, and one of us sneaks upstairs to crack open a window, away from heat and bustle and noise and read a book or listen to whichever music we want to listen to through headphones. But that’s what it will be to you, a memory. Something to be savoured, to drink in and let wash over you. You will have your own life, a life that some or all of us will be parts of, but you will lead.

Dr Reginald Archibald lived his life under dual curses. His name was made of 6 syllables that sound ridiculous when said in a Welsh sing-song voice. Say it in your head, with a Welsh accent - hear the absurdity of it: ‘Reg-i-nald Arch-i-bald’. He could never go to Wales: there were over 2 million people he could never meet. He was also forever cursed with two first names and no surname. It is impossible to take anyone truly seriously if they have no surname.

Despite these apparent shortcomings, Dr Reginald Archibald had dug out his own path.  He knew never to go to Wales, and ran away whenever a Welsh person approached him; his PhD, a genre-defining piece that tried to re-understand global markets by comparing them directly to medieval rural agrarian communities had briefly flared into popularity in the late 90s. He had presented three different Open University programmes, and he had no cats at all. He was the fucking don of the bus. No one could throw further than him. No one could give a better back massage than him. No one could touch his greatness.

Sometimes, however, even the greatest of men have self-doubt. It doesn’t matter that Dr Reginald Archibald could name many of the core wine grape varieties in the world; it doesn’t matter that the singer Babybird once told him that the song ‘You’re Gorgeous’ was written directly about him, and that any claim about it being written about a girl was a lie; it doesn’t matter that he could give a disturbingly concise précis of any one of the films of Michael Haneke. Sometimes Dr Reginald Archibald felt the need to compare himself and come up short.

The man -or should we say youth?  - has three spots on his face: if you were to pull a sharpie out of your bag and join them together with thick black lines then you would have a perfect right angled triangle. There was a certain longing from all on the bus to do this. The spots are large, throbbing:  a lack of cleanliness exudes from those very pores. He is eating a sandwich, and has a small fleck of lettuce stuck between his top right canine and incisor: it appears to be only getting more lodged there as he takes more bites. It is unclear whether the lettuce in the sandwich is the only vegetation that he has eaten of late. Dr Reginald Archibald watched him with a sick curiosity; Dr Reginald Archibald was terrified of him.

It may have been the rhythmic chewing, a rhythm that reminded of him a cow chewing cud. Dr Reginald Archibald was terrified of cows, ever since they tried to trample him on the way back from the pub. The cows were demons. In his head, anyone rhythmically chewing transported him back to that night. It was another reason that he hated Wales.

It may also have been the nonchalance of the spots: Dr Reginald Archibald had never had to deal with acne. His face was perfectly smooth, despite his advancing years; the undergraduate students still looked at him with lust in their eyes. As a teen, however, he had occasionally had a pimple or two, spots that had lain incipient, bulging silently until bursting into life: his mother took pleasure in squeezing them so hard that they bled. If Dr Reginald Archibald were to develop spots like the youth’s, he would set himself a brand new exfoliation regime, one that scrubbed dead skin and opened pores, that let all of the toxins out of his body and let all of the health in: a regime that all other regimes would be jealous of.

Dr Reginald Archibald could no longer bear to look at him, with his nonchalance, his vim and vigour, his Blackberry that he went click click click on, his club music beating out a tinny bass to the whole bus, his tracksuit bottoms and BLT sandwich. Dr Reginald Archibald was irate that this man existed, that he could show him up for what he was – a fop, a pseud, a dandy. Dr Reginald Archibald felt sure that this young man could throw further than him.

We travelled to the lake every year, my family and I; every summer we would pack the H registration Red Sierra that lasted until it died on a road in the Pyrenees, backing up traffic and creating havoc on a mountain pass. The car’s panels groaned with camping gas stoves, sleeping bags, board games, and books; the suspension sagged.

In 1997 my brother and I had our Pokemon cards taken and burned by my father, after my brother replaced all of my rare ones with Pokeball cards and I stuffed his pillow-case with butter as an act of vengeance. My father set fire to them one by one, showing each card to us in turn and sadly smiling. I soon learned that Charizard is not nearly as resistant to fire as he is in the game:  the room quickly filed with the scent of burning plastic laminate, and the sound of two boys weeping and gnashing teeth.  A letter was sent explaining our banning from playing the game, and the ban spread across the whole school when Mitun Patel was beaten up for a Snorlax.

Every year without fail, David and I would do paper/scissors/stone for who got the top bunk, even up to the year when my weight made the whole bed collapse in a shudder of splinters and broken hearts. For the rest of the holiday we were forced to sleep bundled in the corner while mum knitted passive-aggressively: last year she got drunk and told me she forgave me for ruining the holiday in 1999, even though the deposit was nearly £200. I spent that summer listening to the Manic Street Preachers on a Discman and crying: my teenage years are still an unpleasant memory.

I live in a flat that bears the detritus of a life that never lived up to the possibility of those holidays. David and I would run to the lake to be bitten by midges, to swing on the tire-swing; later we sunbathed and talked about Laura from school, the girl in my year who wore a black bra under her blouse. As we grew older, we smuggled alcohol to the lake, and met the sisters who stayed in the cabin opposite, who we had been seeing every year without fail, and who suddenly changed in our eyes when we had both hit puberty. I shared my first kiss being bitten by midges, drunk on two smuggled cans of Carlsberg and a forgotten ¼ bottle of Lamb’s Navy Rum that had not been touched since Grandad died; she was a blonde girl with braces who I never saw again and whose name I realise that I had forgotten in 2003, when I was reading History at Durham.

We stopped going to the lake in 2001 when David did his GCSEs and decided to go to Reading Festival instead; mum and dad decided that there was little point anymore in going, with David away and me so depressed.  My brother and I grew apart, no longer bound together by interminably long holidays. We sometimes talk fondly of them, on one of the rare occasions we speak: a shared imprint of common experiences that can bind us together. In those times we are forever those young boys who were forced to stay in the Scouts until we were both Patrol Leaders, those young boys who hid butter in each other’s pillows and collapsed the bed.

It was a beautiful wedding marred only by the fact that the DJ played Sweet Caroline twice in a row: when I asked the DJ if he could play ‘Little Red Corvette’ by Prince he yelled ‘hell no, THAT WOULD BE SO INAPPROPRIATE’, and then played DJ Otzi while pelvic thrusting for 3 minutes. The DJ was a liability, and had probably been borrowed from his usual job of yelling at children on fairground rides.

I first spied him across the dance floor while my girlfriend threw up the remnants of three free glasses of red wine in the bathroom; he wore a narrow collared shirt with a tie cut too wide for it, sticking out and bunching up underneath the neckline, gyrating nonchalantly to Another Level’s Freaky while the grandmothers looked on aghast, hair askew and eyes bloodshot with alcohol; his lips and teeth were stained red with wine. The floor of the hall stuck to my feet.

I punched him before I knew his name, his back story or what he stood for; I punched him for catharsis and because I loathed the smirk on his face; I punched him because I have become emotionally involved with Jess and Nick’s burgeoning love affair in New Girl, and I have to wait for a day before I can stream it online. I punched him because his socks matched his trousers; I punched him because he was wearing a brown belt and black shoes; I punched him because I couldn’t stand him.

I would love to say that his nose created a mushroom cloud of blood, erupting volcanically and spraying onlookers, that he blacked out and woke up with me kicking him violently in the kidneys, or in the back of an ambulance. I would love to say that there was a cheer from the crowd, who picked me up on their shoulders and paraded me across the bar: their champion, their King.

I came off from that punch badly, not knowing that he was a semi-professional cage-fighter from Croydon with the chip on your shoulder that only being from Croydon can bring. He fought dirtily, with aplomb and practice, carefully destroying my self-confidence, my standing in the room and my friendship with the groom. My girlfriend, who had emerged from throwing up in the bathroom yelled to ‘gerroff ‘im’ in a Cockney accent that she had previously never had. She left me soon after to begin a new relationship with a man who had elbowed me in the testicles for thirty seconds. I coughed up a tooth that day, and drank whisky until I passed out.