Pop!

I just sang along to Timbaland featuring Katy Perry. At my desk.

It’s ok, my voice is somewhere between Cat Stevens and Jon Bon Jovi. Manly, with the right splash of emotion. I could have made it, but subediting copy about printing machines was the stronger calling. God I love those Heidelbergs.

I tweeted this fact, anyway. And my friend Dan, of Worth fame, said: “ipod on this morning, lily allen first of the 5000+ songs to shuffle on, yeah that’ll do I thought.”

Dan is a purist! Lilly Allen? The love child of a gremlin and a riddler with the self-awareness of a blind and deaf dyspraxic? This was like Osama Bin Laden saying the Our Father.

But, and I’m feeling a bit alcoholic anonymous about this, I must stand up and say it too: “I’m Jon, and I have sung along to Lilly Allen.”

It doesn’t stop there. I sing along to Beyonce, Shakira, NeYo, Katy Perry, bloody Miley Cyrus (and doesn’t that make you feel like a dirty old man at 26?!)

Is it that the music has grown better from these pop starlets or that we, me and Dan and our ilk, have grown more tolerant? Are we just less uptight, having found our cruising speed, happy to be identified as ourselves not our music?

Perhaps. It is certainly a teenage condition to be devoted and identifiable by a musical taste. To whine about being understood. To wear Dylan like a badge of maturity. To passionately defend four hours of pointless prog rock white noise.

But then there are plenty of stunted growth adults out there still in the throws of adulation.

But there is something in being at an age of understanding and acceptence. Lily Allen is quite clearly a spoilt, self-obsessed petulant woman-child. I HATE her. But you try not humming along to It’s Not Fair and having a wry chuckle about blow jobs. You can’t do it. Don’t pretend you can.

It’s the tune. It hooks you in. An irresistible melody or a bum shaking bass line.

And look how middle-aged those three sentences are?

I’m being ushered into the end game by Beyonce and Shakira.

I can think of worse things…

Education

The child, (six or seven?) stared at the yellow barriers and insisted to his father that this train was exactly the same train as he had been on before. Because of the scratches. They were the same scratches.

Not knowing whether he was some sort of special autistic wonder child, I accepted his version of events. He looked bright enough. Bit white eyes. No flaws.

Two American men discussing the intricate details of getting a visa to continue working in Britain, loudly and insistently stood close by. When the train stopped and people departed they lunged for the two available chairs. The boy and his father looked on.

The American man nearest the boy pulled out a copy of Zoo magazine. On the front. Tits.

Well, this would be interesting
A child (six or seven?) and a magazine with some blond girl with her tits out. Dad hadn’t noticed. He was eyeing up the tall brunette across the carriage.

Like father like son, eventually.

The boy turned his head. Caught sight of the magazine. And a grin. A row of white teeth.

“Daaaad.”

A giggle.

“Boobies!!!”

The Dad turned. Assessed. Smiled. Went back to the brunette.

The boy went back to the boobies. Laughing.

“Boobies!”

Uncomfortable, I felt the need to explain. How much does a child (six or seven?) know?

Man’s needs, the objectification of women, sexual exploitation, sex itself. I kept quiet. I would have been arrested. I’m pretty sure the Daily Mail calls sex education paedophilia. And it wasn’t my job. But still, awkward. Should he be seeing that?

Well his mum has them. He’s probably seen them before.

So the Dad watched the brunette and the boy watched the boobies. Until they got off. And the American man noticed.

He went red. He put the magazine in his bag.

Hidden.

I wonder, is that how it all begins?

More sense than the stork, I suppose.

Dead

Reader, I need someone, no not someone, SOMEONE, to die.

A celebrity. One that, preferably, is edgy (read gay or transvestite or anything the Mail hates) enough to provide justification for what I write, but mainstream enough to justify writing in the first place.

You see, the road to journalistic stardom has been cruel. I don’t have a famous daddy. My mummy didn’t fuck a rock star. And I don’t like cock.

So I have been sniffing around the suburbs of journalism.

But I am learning, I am not naïve. Do not claim I cannot play the game. For I know I must wait for a celebrity to die, one edgy enough to justify what I write, but mainstream enough to justify writing at all.

For a dead celebrity is currency. No law suit (from them, anyway), no riposte, and no argument. Right to reply ends on the deathbed. Open season, come on in. I got the claws out. Let’s watch the fireworks.

Caus the dead aren’t sacred. Hell no. And all publicity is good. Controversey sparks interest and outrage. But we’re not hypocrites, yeah? We read it first.

Well yes Mr Advertiser, record figures today. Moir has indeed got her bonus. She’s in a safe house, give it six months, it’ll be fine. She knows it’s worth it.

You have to be careful You can’t do it with everyone. Gately, McQueen… well, I’m not saying homophobia is alive and well, but Moir calling Gately sordid and Toby Young saying McQueen relied on personality and charisma… I’m trying not to say ‘stereotype’.

And, well, maybe they had a point somewhere. Maybe fashion is a bit fickle. Maybe some gay people do have a sordid lifestyle. But most things are fickle when you look too hard and I know some very sordid straight people (yes, I do mean YOU).

But it’s the timing that’s wrong most of all. If Young abhorred McQueen so much, why didn’t he say it at the weekend, a nice topical moment to slag a leading UK designer before the catwalk season kicks off. McQueen could have been invited to respond. All very fair.

Oh, shucks, well, he would probably have not been very happy. And, well, saying it now makes me very big and clever and the man that can see through the mystique and all very grown up. And before, well all my ‘in’ friends who had his clothes for premiers wouldn’t have backed me up, but now he isn’t making any clothes, well, it’s alright, isn’t it?

Well, no. Unless you are a complete arsehole. It’s rubbish journalism. It is cowardly. It’s a one way argument with a dead man. It’s crass. It’s weak.

Worse of all, when Young and Moir depart there’s no-one that will do it back. Caus they are neither mainstream enough to justify writing, nor interesting enough to justify what I would write.

And anyway, I wouldn’t want to do it when they’re dead. Caus I want them to know I think they’re both shit journalists.

Stupid is as…

Trapped. A haze of hair spray and starch.

Pressed. Those clothes don’t bend sugar, those clothes…

High heels. She’s walking on point. She can’t walk on point. Every step’s a fall.

This isn’t the house. Twice over. Different houses.

We’re led in anyway.

Bombed. A bedroom not capable of bedding in. A wire-emancipated box. And a long galley kitchen-cupboard. Dark. Dirty. Deserted. Disastrous.

Don’t fancy a bit of work?

It’s 30k over budget darling, where do you suppose we get 30k from?

She doesn’t get it. I don’t think she’s listening. I knock her on the head and it sounds like popping your cheek with your finger. A dull thud. Try it, now. Flick out your cheek with your finger making an “oh” with your mouth. A dull pop. That’s her. No-one’s home. She couldn’t find a buyer. It’s no fucking surprise.

Has this got central heating?

I think so.

So why are the radiators plugged in.

I’ll have to check.

What, that you’re fucking serious?!

Me and Jade look at each other.

We’re ringing around again. What’s the maintenance, what’s the ground rent, what’s the parking permit, what’s the walk to the station.

They all want to help. But the hands are tied. To an electric radiator. That they think is central heating.

Shafted

Oh, he’s smiling. And she’s saying,

Well, if you think it’s the right decision, for you.

But you know what it’s about. They’ve won. No flesh forfeit.

And the room is too clean for this sort of work. I want a warehouse and some rope. Dust on the ground and mud on the walls. I want a 1960s Jimi Hendrix soundtrack and some guy with a knife. I want rain hammering the corrugated roof and each breath to force a mist into the air that hangs, stuck and imprisoned in the stench of something gone decidedly wrong. Where’s the danger?

But it’s there, hidden in the shine off manicured hands, hidden in the sound of cufflinks hitting the MDF desk, hidden behind, worst of all, the words on the paper.

You see, we’d love to help but… it’s the technicality.

Big corporates hide behind words. On rules written deep and incomprehensibly into contracts.

They mislead you while showing you everything.

Then one day it shows itself.

And you’re fucked.

By words.

It’s someone’s job to do that. To make it hidden. To get them off for everything.

And in clean rooms with no pictures on the walls and a window clean of any spec of dirt, the world comes crashing in and you know the game’s over.

You can’t beat it.

And you pack your bags and go.

 

 

Home

Jade and I, we are possibly looking to buy a house. Because the landlord is selling the one we are in.

On Saturday we shall go and look at a flat. We will try and imagine ourselves in it. Living there. In a space that someone else has owned. Lived in. She is pregnant, so there is a high chance she procreated there, too.

So much life is in a home, that to usurp that, to make it yours, it is quite the spiritual, physical, and mental struggle.

To say this is truly mine. I wonder what ‘home’ is, when you are buying yourself.

The childhood home, it is always there, no matter if the parents or parent has long moved on. The childhood home is more than a physical thing. A childhood home is somehow immortal.

But a home we buy together, how does the conversion happen? How do we make it us?

I suppose we shall find out.

Larkin, as usual, is cynical:

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

Of anyone to please, it withers so,

Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,

A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

The music in the piano stool. That vase.