I Am the Woodlouse

I have a friend who once found himself urinating next to Martin Amis at the ICA. Thankfully, they were both in the toilet at the time, positioned at adjoining urinals. My friend was very interested in drugs in that period of his life – from an academic as well as a practical perspective – so, knowing that Martin Amis wasn’t opposed to a little dabble himself, my friend asked the urinating author which drugs he considered most efficacious for writing. ‘Cannabis,’ replied Amis, tapping the old man thoughtfully. ‘It has a shamanic quality.’



When my friend told me this story, I was thrilled. One of my favourite writers of all time had basically, via a pissing intermediary, said: ‘You carry on the way you are, Stan. You’re doing everything right. You’re going to be OK. Oh, and… get dental insurance.’

Speaking of cannabis, one thing that’s become extremely clear again recently is that although it can, if used carefully, buttress the process of writing, it in no way contributes to a healthy dream life. Currently, however, I haven’t smoked anything for more than a month and I find that I’m dreaming like a drugged wizard.

In fact, as I write this, it's just after 5 a.m. on Saturday morning and I’ve just woken up from an unpleasant dream about Morag.

Actually, I’ve been having lots of unpleasant dreams about Morag recently. In fact, even dreams that did not seem to be about Morag, may have actually been. For example, the dream about the woodlouse.

Sometime last week I dreamt that a woodlouse was living in my chest hair. I was happy about this, despite the fact that when I looked down, it seemed to be coming apart at the seams, its little legs and its almost transparent carapace separating as it struggled in my manly pelt. Then, when I woke up alone, sans woodlouse, I felt horribly alone. Not happily alone, as I have on occasion felt. No. Horribly alone.

Whereas this morning I dreamt that Morag and I were still together and she was distant, down and distinctly uncommunicative. Something had happened with a mutual friend. She said it was something to do with money, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. I didn’t believe her. I woke up in distress. I found myself wanting to go back to the dream and ask her if she loved me at all; if she’d ever loved me.

Could it be that I’m not actually over her?

I don’t think so – I mean, I am over her. It’s not like I want to go back. We weren’t right. I want someone who’s right for me. I want someone who can love me wholeheartedly and Morag couldn’t do that. Not for long. What’s preying on my mind now is the fact that I loved her more than I’ve ever loved before and I’m afraid I’ll never be able to do that again, for fear of doing it wrong, for fear of loving the wrong person. But then just because it didn’t last forever doesn’t mean she was the wrong person to love.

Oh, fuck it. I’m going back to sleep. Perchance to dream sweeter.

...

Sunday night, Monday morning...

I didn’t dream at all last night. Or at least nothing stayed with me. Typical. I’ve cursed it. I will never dream again.

I’m floundering about a bit at the moment. In general I mean. I don’t really know what I’m doing with this blog. And I don’t really know what’s happening with the book. I guess it’s early days still. But on the whole I’m feeling a bit fed up. With everything. Mostly I’m fed up with being cut off from everything. I need change. It’s coming soon I know, but I kind of need it now. So – in the absence of change, I’ve decided to plump for something which is apparently just as good: a rest.

Oh! And well I never. I’ve just realised that a year ago this week, Keith’s old flat was flooded and I stopped blogging till the beginning of September last. That settles it then. This year – although I don’t have the excuse of an act of God – I’m going to do the same. I’m having some time off. Yes. It’s a decision I’ve made. I might draw the occasional Jackson and tweet the occasional nonsense, but unless something staggering happens, I’m away from here till September.

And just in case you’re wondering, this has nothing whatsoever to do with any shame I might feel over my misquotathon in the Daily Mail today. In fact I feel no shame at all. Not that I'm claiming that I’m suddenly a fan of the newspaper. Heaven forfend. I still regularly entertain unimaginably violent fantasies involving Amanda Platell, Peter Hitchens, Richard Littlejohn, Liz Jones, Christopher Hart, a roll of cling film and a meat tenderiser. However, I would like something a friend of mine said – when I mentioned my misgivings on the day of the Mail interview – to be taken into consideration. She said, and I quote:

‘I’m all about preaching to the unconverted, so I think MUCH better to speak to The Enemy, have some of their number find and fall in love with your writing, then be convinced by you that they should live better. It’s really an actively good thing you're doing.’

You See? An Actively Good Thing.

Plus, I’m hoping it’ll sell some more books. Not because I want the money, you understand, but because I want to Heal The World with my words.

Oh, and if you’ve come here from the Daily Mail, and you’re genuinely not aware of what a hideous paper it is, then look at this. And have a good long think about what you’ve done.

So. That’s all for now. Oh, except this, which is funny.

Right. I'm done.

See you in September. In London!

Oh, and I realise of course, that in many ways – deep breath – yes – I am the woodlouse.



Goo goo g’joob.

Sebastian Horsley :: The Most Tiresome Man in London

I bought Time Out yesterday because I’ve been getting back into Martin Amis recently – just started rereading Dead Babies, which is great fun. Amis was mentioned on the cover of TO. Granted, all it said was ‘London’s raunchiest writing selected by Martin Amis [and other authors]’. I knew it wouldn’t be much then, but with the added promise of a bit of raunch, I thought it’d be worth it.

From Amis there are 41 words bigging up Henry Fielding. Which was rather disappointing, I have to say. As for the raunch…

The article is entitled ‘Cunning Linguists’ – pause for belly-laughs – and it promises ‘Time Out’s pick of London’s 30 finest-ever peddlers of smut, filth and depravity’. I’m afraid I got as far as Sebastian Horsley and skimmed the rest.

Is it just me or is there something to be said for subtlety in this world?

Here are a few examples of some of the writing considered by Time Out writer John O’Connell to be worthy of praise:

‘All the time he gorged and slurped on Hugo’s dick, he wanked his own, which swelled into a fat organ dribbling colourless fluid.’

- from A Matter of Life and Sex by Oscar Moore

‘Since my fingers were greased, I worked them into Sarah’s arse and soon she was bucking like an unbroken horse.’

- from Cunt by Stewart Home

‘…to hear a man moan above her as he came, shuddered, shouted out obscenities or religious adjectives, and experience the heat waves coursing from cunt to heart to brain.’

- from Paris Noir by Maxim Jakubowski

(This could be down to my appalling lack of experience, but what, pray, are the religious adjectives that one might shout out during sex? Not nouns or the names of deities, but adjectives. Really, I’m very keen to know.)

OK, so the quotes above are taken out of context and I’ve not read books from which they’re taken and they could be great books, of course they could, but what irks me about all this dick-slurping and arse-greasing is that, on the whole – fnaar - it’s very very very very boring. There’s no artistry to it. I’m talking about the writing here of course – there could be a breath-taking amount of artistry in the actual slurping of the dick or the actual greasing of the arse. But writing about it in such bald, prosaic terms is about as erotic as a knee-trembler in a lorry full of rotting meat. Actually, scratch that – that might just work.

You see, I reckon that this excerpt, from Keats, is actually genuinely erotic:

‘Anon his heart revives: her vespers done;
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.’

- from The Eve of St Agnes

For me, that is arousing. I am sitting here with the glimmer of genital emboldenment and a palpable ache to read on. Whereas all that balls-out ‘ooh, look at me cunt!’ rubbish just leaves me cold. I find it really tiresome.

Now, speaking of tiresome, we come to Sebastian Horsley.

I would like at this point to officially nominate him as London’s Most Tiresome Man. I’ve encountered people like this before. They’re always going on about fucking babies or raping nuns or wanking over Hitler or smearing shit on dead bodies. And they seem to genuinely believe themselves to be shocking, and they clearly get off on it. They’re addicted to it. They’re shockaholics. But those aren’t gasps they can hear, they’re yawns. For there is nothing more inherently tedious than people whose only desire is to show the world with how incredibly outrageous they are.

Plus, to make matters worse, this Horsley character also prides himself on his pretentiousness. Everything he says reeks of pith. He has bon mots coming out of his top hat. He considers himself a dandy, an artist, a renegade.

‘Living in Soho is like an ongoing orgasm… God created the country, Satan created Soho. It is proof that hell is full and the damned walk the streets. It is a madhouse without walls… Ten years ago, on a good night here you could get your throat cut. Now there’s even a health club in Soho! Can you imagine that? It has really got worse. The air used to be clean and the sex dirty, and now it’s the other way around. The only pocket of resistance is my house... It’s better to be quotable than honest... I say that I injected cocaine into my knob but that was actually heroin... Think of how many boring, blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretion of me.’

If you were with him and he came out with stuff like that, you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself, would you? You’d just have to take off his top hat and be sick in it.

Oh, and he prides himself on his misogyny too. Of course he does, he’s outrageous. Here are a selection of things Sebastian Horsley has said about women:

‘I remember the first time I had sex - I still have the receipt. The girl was alive, as far as I could tell, she was warm and she was better than nothing. She cost me £20.’

‘What I hate with women generally is the intimacy, the invasion of my innermost space, the slow strangulation of my art.’

‘The problem is that the modern woman is a prostitute who doesn't deliver the goods. Teasers are never pleasers; they greedily accept presents to seal a contract and then break it. At least the whore pays the flesh that's haggled for.’

- all of the above quotes from this, his paean to prostitution. (you may find it interesting to contrast that vile, self-centred, self-fellating, barrage of contrived outrageousness with this, written by someone who doesn't appear to hate women, sex or himself.)

And then there’s this from the Time Out article:

‘Let’s just say for the sake of argument that I’m a misogynist. If I want to dislike women I should be allowed to. As it happens I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained. I just like pissing people off. I like language and it excites me to write violently against the things that I love. Everyone knows it isn’t right to go and chop women’s heads off….’

Horsley is like the six-year-old boy who has just discovered he can get a reaction if he takes down his pants or says ‘fuck’ a lot. There is desperation oozing from him. And of course, he only says these things so that people will respond, and be shocked. But they're not shocked, they're merely repulsed. And bored. But of course that’s enough for Horsley. As he says on his dreary, try-hard blog, ‘The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.’

Oh, well. Best stop then.

But I will leave the last words to him.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you, Sebastian Horsley, London’s Most Tiresome Man:

‘Why shouldn’t I be allowed to say stupid, outrageous things? If you don’t like them, you can suck my Nazi cock.’

Yawn.

Old Dogs

When I got home last night, the real pain had not yet properly begun. But it was in the post. Express delivery. In fact, it would shake me awake like a sociopathic prison guard in about seven hours. I just had time to revisit Money by Martin Amis to see how I measured up to John Self when he was foolish enough to think he could play tennis and get away with it.

I ended up reading for at least an hour and a half. I’d forgotten how much I love Martin Amis’s writing. He was the first writer I ever really fell for. Here’s a bit from the tennis match scene. It’s fun:

‘…At love-thirty I served so blind and wild that Fielding simply reached out and caught the ball on the volley. He pocketed it and strolled forward a few paces – several paces. I moved wide and, in petulant despair, hit my second serve as if it were my first. And it went in! Fielding was less surprised than I was but he only just got his racket to the ball – and he was so insultingly far advanced that his return was nothing more than a skied half-volley. The yellow ball plopped down invitingly in the centre of my court. I hit it pretty low, hard and deep to Fielding’s backhand and lumbered cautiously up to the net. A big mistake. Fielding chose this moment to unleash a two-fisted topspin drive. The ball came screaming over the tape, skipped a beat, regathered its momentum – and punched me in the face. I toppled over backwards and my racket fell with a clatter. For several shocked seconds I lay there like an old dog, an old dog that wants its old belly stroked…

After five minutes I was playing with a more or less permanent mouthful of vomit. It was the slowest hour of my life, and I’ve had some slow hours.’

Yep, that’s pretty much exactly how it was. I played with Pip, a friend of Keith’s who was something in software till he was made redundant last year some time. Pip is nearly ten years older than me but much, much fitter. He plays tennis a lot since he lost his job, and despite the fact that he wiped the floor with me, it was clear that he was actually taking it very easy. By the end of the hour and a bit that we played, he hadn’t broken a sweat, whereas I looked obscene, like a giant overripe plum, throbbing dangerously and tossing out phlegm.

So naturally, I woke up this morning feeling like I’d been beaten to within a millimetre of my life. I inched to the bathroom an hour or so ago, then made a detour to pick up my laptop. Now I’m back in bed. I have a lot to do today, but I’m not sure I can manage it.

I’m also slightly hungover, which doesn’t help matters. Speaking of which, I had a very odd conversation with Pip last night in the pub.

It begins with a poodle.

Six months ago, because she was worried, Pip insured his mum’s pet poodle. Then, as she’s without funds beyond a substandard state pension, he finds himself paying the £17 monthly premium. (Which seems like an awful lot to me. Especially for a poodle.) Then as the months creep by, Pip starts to worry himself. He’s running out of money. The last thing he wants to do however, is find another job, so he starts to look at how he can save money. He cancels a couple of direct debits. For example, a Lovefilm subscription which he never uses, and a gym subscription which he never uses, together amounting to a saving of £50 a month. But he’s bitter about that poodle. He says he wants some return on his investment.

He said to me, ‘How hard can it be to break a dog’s leg?’ He said, ‘It’s not like it’s a Great Dane or anything. It’s not like it’s going to retaliate. It’s a scrawny little thing, and it’s old. Weak. On Sunday I was round at my mum’s, and Steve was there, snuffling about.’ That’s the dog’s name. Steve. Steve the 14-year-old poodle. ‘He’s not even very friendly anymore. Plus he’s started shitting indoors, which is annoying. To say the least. So I’m doing the washing-up after dinner. Stacking the machine. And he’s mooching around my feet. So I crouch down and I say “sit”, and he sits. Then I say “give me your paw”, and he gives me his paw. And I’m there, with Steve’s paw in my hand, thinking, “How much would I get for a paw broken in two, maybe three places?” I apply a tiny bit of pressure and he whimpers and scampers off. It would have to be a swift, clean break.’

At which point I put it to him that if he breaks the dog’s leg and receives money from the insurance company to fix the dog’s leg, surely – correct me if I’m wrong, and I may very well be – but surely that money would have to be spent on fixing the dog’s leg? He nods, thinking. ‘You might be right.’ He nods again. ‘You’re right.’ He shakes his head, looking sorry. ‘There’s only one thing for it then. Steve must die.’

We spent the rest of the evening discussing the moral implications of murdering his mother’s dog – I can’t imagine that the thing actually has life assurance; this seems like madness to me – and then I came home, aches and pains completely anaesthetised by four pints of Guinness.

Now as I lie here, with the anaesthetic worn off, shifting around in groggy agony, I realise that Steve and I actually have very little in common.

You see, I wanted to say that we had a great deal in common, and be dreadfully poignant about it. But we don’t.

* He lives with a lady. I live alone.
* He has insurance. I have none.
* He cannot learn new tricks. I most certainly can.
* He has a psychotic software developer - who apparently could have played tennis for the county - trying to cripple him. I… actually yeah, we do have that in common.

Still, three out of four ain’t bad. Ah, I’m feeling better already. Now all I need is someone to pop round and stroke my old belly…