How I Came To Terms With The Tyranny Of The Weekend: A Lazy Man's Perspective.

Au contraire...

It’s raining outside, and I'm glad. It’s that deciduous summer rain peculiar to Britain, thrown casually from passing clouds which could care less for the feelings of holidaymakers. You’ll have heard it pounding the roof of your tent or caravan, or seen it streaming down the window of the seafront café or amusement arcade. If you’re eleven years old it’s bank holiday ruining weather, trapping you indoors and stealing the fag-end of the summer holiday. If you’re a chap in your forties however, maybe feeling a bit lazy, sitting on your arse and all you need to make you the happiest of men is a film in any genre where you might find David Niven, then the rain is excellent news, it means no one can reasonably expect you to set foot past the front door. I’m not talking chronic laziness you understand, of the Channel 4 documentary “Fetch mama’s stick” type, just an acute 48 hour attack of velcro buttock.

There are dark forces working against you if it refuses to rain on a

Would David Niven have attended Zumba?

weekend such as this. An unwritten British rule that sunshine must not be wasted. To do so feels like a minor sin, as though you’re giving away a little bit of your soul. You have to find something, anything to do outside, no matter if you want to or not. It’s a tyranny.

A similar tyranny is the feeling nagging at the back of your mind that you might not have done enough. You might not have put enough effort in to satisfy the inevitable post hoc discussion when you get back to work. “What did you get up to at the weekend?” is rapidly becoming one of the most intimidating questions a man like myself of simple, quiet tastes can face. A thrill runs through me as of cold war East Berlin and the demand of “Papers!”

I’m usually taken more by surprise by the question than I should be. Initially my mind goes blank and I imagine I look confused, startled. I can’t remember what I did. The pause stretches. The polite smile on the questioner’s face starts to look brittle as they begin to wonder if they are talking to an imbecile. “Why is he so reluctant?” they’re thinking, “is he covering something up? A murder, maybe, perhaps this Ukraine business is his fault.” Eventually I do remember, but then is it enough? Do I lead an interesting enough life to satisfy this person? Have they had a more interesting time than me and if so does this mean they have in some way “won”? There is the other side of the coin to consider, as well. What if I've had too interesting a weekend? What if I flew to Rome for lunch, or spent my time racing cars against high class call girls? Should I make some self-deprecating joke about it in case I’m judged harshly as a try-too-hard?

In all likelihood I won’t have done these things. Most of my weekends sound pretty pedestrian in these conversations as is the case, I suspect, with the majority of people who have exceeded their vodka and clubbing years. This, in fact, is my issue. I considered doing more exciting things in order to spice up these Monday morning exchanges, but realised in time that I would be rolling over and submitting to oppression by a minority. I chose instead a path of honest, passive resistance. These days I answer truthfully and with pride. “I read a book on marketing psychology,” I say, my expression adding: “No, no reason, I thought it might be interesting”. Sometimes I might say “I was out with friends,” and I hope my open, honest smile conveys the rest of the message, to the effect of: “we talked about interesting stuff and laughed our arses off, without feeling the need to do so whilst water skiing or learning to play Ghanaian death drums in a community centre”.

I like to flatter myself I’m not completely boring, but I also think I have the right to the occasional dull weekend without the tacit implication that I’m wasting my life. I’m not wasting it, I’m doing stuff I like, which might just be drinking tea and watching an entire run of an American cop show, or learning all the internet has to offer on the formation of metals in collapsing suns (did you know all the iron in the universe is formed in a particular twenty second window in the life of a star?) or even just spending some time with

A "fat bike" for when
just cycling somewhere
isn't enough.

my friends, perhaps in a restaurant that isn’t owned by a TV chef.

I realise of course that all this is (probably) all in my head and just my personal paranoia. When it comes down to it, it’s a trivial opener, designed to say one of two things, either:

Hello. I’d like to converse with you for no other reason than to enjoy a few moments of greeting, as we’re a social species and it’s the sort of thing we do. I have no particular information to pass to you and no need of anything specific from you. I have nothing prepared so I’ll just slot this in to give us a bit of thinking time while the chat gets going.

Or alternatively:

Hello, I hate you. I’ve always hated you. For me, you’re one of the downsides of turning up here every day, but since this isn’t the last day of working here for either of us I feel telling you would bring these issues to the surface, creating needless bad feeling which we would then have to live with until one of us resigns or works out a way of murdering the other without getting caught. Further, I might, God forbid, need something from you at some point and the worse these situations are, the more degrading it will be for me to get on my knees and beg.

Either way, I suppose it’s just a useful cliché, a harmless little mental shortcut we can trot out and play our parts in while we settle more comfortably into the exchange. It could always be the case of course that the questioner genuinely cares and is honestly interested to find out just which of my riveting pastimes I may have been engaged in.

If this weekend tyranny is, at least in part, coming from my own head, I should think about what I’m trying to tell myself. Perhaps I am dull. I might be so boring that I’m embarrassed to tell myself and have to project my opinion onto others in the hope that I take my hint and liven myself up. Maybe I do want to do stuff that I don’t want to do. I suppose I have to consider the possibility that I’m over thinking the issue.

Lastly, on the subject of perspective, to anyone who may unaccountably be reading this in a refugee camp, or a bombed out school far from my armchair and is politely thinking “Yes, I can see how these problems would bring you such great suffering, tell me again about the clean water you use to make tea”, I can only apologise.

                                     
                                                                                                                            AA

Why I Love Coffee

You’re onto a bit of a winner selling anything that people are willing to get themselves addicted to,

the only downside being when some killjoy makes it illegal. Perhaps coffee will go the same way and a hundred years hence people will look back on us (whole workplaces so jacked up by four in the afternoon that we can no longer read or force a biro between our splintering teeth) with the same astonishment we direct toward those top-hatted people at the beginning of the last century who, when they weren’t quietening their babies and coughing spouses with heroin, were perking themselves up with cocaine wine.

The London coffee shop was born in 1652 when a Greek merchant Pasque Rosée began importing the bean from what are now Yemen and

Ethiopia via Istanbul. He opened a stall in a back alley so that others could share in his addiction which indeed they did with enormous enthusiasm. People of all stripes of society gathered in the London mud to get themselves jittery and gossip insatiably. The

real heyday of this initial burst of coffee culture would come through the first half of the following century, when there would grow to be eighty or so coffee houses within the old walls of the city. By the middle of that same century The East India Company had decided everyone should be drinking tea from their profitable plantations and slowly the promiscuous English taste buds began to be teased away from the bean and into their enduring love affair with the leaf. It may well have been the advent of electronic information transmission in the 19th century that finally did for the last of the London coffee house culture, the last of them closed or transformed into gentleman’s clubs around this time. London wouldn’t see another coffee shop until the espresso bars of the 1950s, springing up as a consequence of that second Roman invasion whose ambition, more modest than Caesar’s, centred on “Little Italy” in Clerkenwell.

As I write, I sit less than a mile from the Brighton house of Henry and Hester (Mrs.) Thrale, that lively 18th century daughter of Welsh gentry much visited by Samuel Johnson and I think even the good doctor would raise an eyebrow at the proliferation of coffee houses over the last couple of decades. As now, the first outbreak

I don't know if Munch enjoyed a coffee,
but it wouldn't surprise me

of the bean accompanied an insatiable general hunger for information as men (reputable women steered clear) would gather, pump each other for news and engage in over-stimulated discussions and debates. Although some of these reported were of the nonsensically existential variety familiar to anyone who has been buttonholed at a London party (the kind where no one goes to the bathroom in groups of less than four), much useful exchange was had concerning fashionable plays, politics, science (it is said that Isaac Newton dissected a dolphin on a table in the Grecian, near the Royal Society) and of course finance: the first stocks were traded in Jonathan’s near The royal Exchange and shipping (in fact, all) insurance was born at Lloyd’s (Hence the apostrophe, unlike the bank) which was situated on Tower Street, moving to Lombard Street three years later. The Thrales’ Brighton house is long demolished now, the site being occupied by the sort of bar where it isn’t possible to hold a detailed conversation with anyone, let alone a lexicographer with (probable) Tourettes and half a pound of coffee inside him.

Many attribute credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for the present caffeine explosion to Howard Schultz and his Starbucks (no apostrophe, oddly) brand, which is either the symbol of the death of heterogeneity in western culture, the responsible face of capitalism or the propaganda arm of the Israeli Defence Force, depending on which web sites most fit your politics. The truth is the blue touch paper in Britain was lit before that when Sergio and Bruno Costa opened their shop in 1978 on Vauxhall Bridge Road, near Buckingham Palace, but it was slow burning; no one at the

time was prepared to be Italian until Italy had been sanitised through the filter of American culture. Now of course fashion craves authentic individuality and Starbucks is finding it difficult to turn an honest London dollar: we customers are fickle. Starbucks entered Britain in 1998 with the purchase of the 64 strong chain The Seattle Coffee Co. The word Seattle is a clue that one of the drivers of this second coffee revolution was the beginning of another information frenzy (I.T. folk, unlike telegraph operators, do love a stimulant). Like Pasque Rosée, Scott and Ally Svenson set up their Seattle Coffee Co. because they missed the coffee houses that fuelled the finest minds of their titular city. This time around, coffee was not a new concept for the people of Britain (we had Mellow Birds, for God’s sake), what the Svensons and the Costas were offering was good coffee. (Not even Rosée had that, coffee in the 17th/18th century tasted like shit - contemprary description - mixed with soot, only more addictive).

Having a good product wasn’t the clever bit, any fool with a kettle and an import licence can do that. The clever bit was selling it wrapped in added value. Because of the way associative memory works, there is a sort of cultural metatagging that comes with a heavily marketed consumable. It has, for a long time, been impossible to just “have a glass of wine” without also consuming the information that comes with it. Perhaps we are enjoying a single vineyard Argentinian Malbec, but in doing so we are also engaging in an unspoken dialogue with a winemaker we are unlikely ever to meet that transcends geography, time and language. Consciously or subconsciously we imagine the sun on the lush slopes of the vineyard in the foothills of the Andes, the leather faced artisan removing his hat to wipe his brow and worry about the night time temperature being too cool for the grapes. In actual fact the Mendoza plains are flat and the winemaker is just as likely to be female and/or a downwardly mobile investment banker, but that sort of detail doesn’t make it through marketing.  More recently, coffee has nailed a seat firmly to this bandwagon and we are encouraged to appreciate the

geography associated with the origins of our drink and the process involved in getting it to our lips, as well as - in more extreme cases - how the digestive properties of certain species of cat might affect the taste. It’s all part of inserting the mere sensual experience into a broader narrative, and we love it. We can’t not, we’re programmed to be drawn to narrative, it’s how we make sense of the world. Once we’ve been fed the information, we can make the connections and enjoy the resulting mini neural orgasm that is our dopamine reward system. We can sip at our Monsooned Malabar and picture the beans being raked around a South Indian warehouse, open to the weather (replicating the moisture absorbing journey in the hold of a 19th century sailing ship that mellowed the flavour). It makes for a much richer experience, we value it more and the more we value something of course, the more we will be prepared to pay for it, especially if we are sitting among the kind of cool, daytime caféeistas who can be not at work and yet still afford £2.50 a cup to rent a chair. Which is where I am.

                               AA

Why I Enjoy Dialling

This is the one I was thinking of.

There is a black and white photograph (what film it comes from I don’t know), of Hedy Lamarr, reputedly the world’s most beautiful woman if 1940s P.R. is to be believed. She is holding a telephone receiver to her ear and looking both past the camera (possibly at a yawning boom operator) and fantastic. You know by looking at her that she’s in a drama. You just know she’s talking to a smirking alpha with a moustache and a double breasted suit and you know she’s going to end the call with an emphatic slamming down of the receiver, or maybe she will replace it slowly and deliberately with silent, restrained emotion. What she does straight after that you won’t find out, however, because the scene is inevitably cut there. There’s no need to see more, the message has been sent. We, the audience, already know what’s going on in her head and in her heart.

This picture wouldn’t work with an iPhone, you’d just assume she was ordering Japanese food or expounding plot exposition with a hipster hacker in front of a screen somewhere. Either way you would, in this scenario, almost certainly find out what she does afterwards because you would get a few seconds of post-call reaction. You have to; watching someone talking on an iPhone is just not that evocative.

Similarly, while in the days of bakelite and braided cable you would often see a character dialling, you rarely see anyone searching through a smartphone menu in a film, unless the content of the menu is necessary to move the plot forward. The activity within itself is emotionally meaningless. It’s too new and we have attached no symbolism to it. Even when you see someone doing it in real life there’s an awful, blank-faced sterility about it. Dialling on a rotary dial is different. It’s more of a physical action. The visual impact of it builds tension. Even the mechanical click-whirr seems to build a connection with the character on the other end of the dialling finger that thumbing a menu, even with Idris Elba scowling down at it, cannot.

This is some of the reason, I think, why I enjoy dialling. I didn’t dial for years and never realised I missed it. like everyone else I have a smartphone and if I do feel the need to go wired when I’m out and about I’m usually a button man, as this is what is universally available. I am, however, old enough to remember the time when push-button phones first became popular and everyone had to have one. They were modernity, sophistication, the pina colada of British Telecom supplanting the warm beer of the General Post Office. This obsolescence of style, although we could not know it, foreshadowed the irrational orgy of consumption to which the communication hardware market would aspire. Even the Trimphone became old. You felt more dynamic hitting buttons, more immediate, more - dare I say it - American. J.R. Ewing pressed buttons to dial or, more accurately, he pressed one button and his secretary dialled, but she (yes, she: this was J.R.) would press buttons. Before you knew it, all of Britain was sleek, stark and modern. You would no more catch Ultravox on a rotary dial telephone than you would Tubbs or Crockett.

The spread of the communication cocaine that is the mobile telephone was a further revolution, the end of staying in and pacing fretfully while awaiting the life changing call from that special girl/boy/employer/G.U.M. doctor.

There are many people to thank for the astonishing impact of the mobile telephone, not least among them Gene Roddenbury and Captain Kirk for the inspiration and indeed Hedy Lamarr who, as well as being the most beautiful woman in the world and a Hollywood star of the kind you just don’t get any more, was a mathematician and electronics genius. When she wasn’t in front of the camera simpering to her chest-measurement I.Q. leading men, Lamarr worked out the spread-spectrum, frequency hopping technology which enables you to carry on an unbroken call as you cross from cell to cell. She wasn’t thinking about telephones of course (this was the 1940s and people were still happy to be tethered to the wall by their ears) she was trying to control musical instruments remotely. I’ve no idea why she wanted to do this, or if there was a need for it at the time, but there would shortly be a definite need to prevent Johnny Nazi jamming the signals of good American radio controlled torpedoes, which is how the technology was first usefully employed. I would have liked to say you wouldn’t catch Hedy Lamarr being J.R.’s secretary but I expect you would if the script called for it and they could afford her. Some revolutions take longer than others.

Even our phone books have become electronic and dialling of any kind has almost gone out of vogue altogether. Indeed it feels odd and old fashioned now even to have to push buttons. Everything is getting very electronic. No, that’s the wrong word, it was always electronic. Everything is getting very digital. As communication gets more effortless, the process loses something of its soul. Yes we can talk to whoever we want, whenever we want and wherever we want but the activity within itself becomes devalued. There is - to my mind - a payoff between the increasing ease of connection via layers of technology and an increasing emotional disconnection with the actual process.

What I mean by that can be illustrated by looking at the parallel changes in the music recording industry over the decades. When you listen to a studio album now, a great deal of effort has gone into the production. The musicians have likely played in a special environment to separately record the sound of each instrument so that they may be expertly mixed, with echo and reverb to make everything sound more “natural”. The best parts of many takes will be stitched together and the overall final product that meets your ears will be as close to perfection as the recording engineer and producer can make it. That’s a wonderful thing, assuming their ideas of musical perfection agree with yours and recorded music sounds incredible now, especially as, with more digital storage space available we start to move beyond the CD and have access to the same resolution, range and depth in what we buy as was heard in the studio. Contrast this with an old 1920s blues 78. The recording process for this, in its simplest form, involved musicians playing and singing into a horn mechanically vibrating the recording stylus, which cut the wax of the master disc, which in turn was used to make the record. The quality will be terrible to modern ears, the sound reedy, thin and metallic and most likely scratchy. Why people still love and collect them however is because of that connection, the emotional bond with the process. When you hear a 1920s acoustic recording you’re only two handshakes away from the guy with the guitar. How much value does this have? In 2013 John Tefteller, not a particularly wealthy man, paid $37100 for a copy of Tommy Johnson’s 1929 recording “Alcohol And Jake Blues”

It was this sensation of increasing disconnection that got me nostalgically hankering after and then searching for an old rotary dial telephone. I wanted to dial like Roger Moore in The Saint again. It’s possible what I was actually doing was making a futile subconscious effort to reconnect with the less complicated years of my youth when the action of one finger could summon a whole group of us to an evening dedicated solely to fun, with fewer of the nonsensical emotional distractions that, like rust, accumulate with time. Originally, I would have been happy with the 1960s/70s GPO models of my childhood, the ones that sat in the hall at home that you see Jack Regan shouting into. In the end however, I couldn’t resist the 'otel réception elegance of a black and gold 1940s Belgique Bell telephone. Not quite Hercules Poirot country, but not far off.

I’ve been rotary dialling in the privacy of my own home now for some time and from it I still derive a great deal of simple if curious enjoyment. I know I’m lying to myself and my conversation partner of the moment isn’t simply at the end of a copper wire, but I find myself able and happy to go along with the illusion. Even the dialling in of foot-long mobile numbers is a harmless pleasure rather than a chore. I’m even beginning to remember some frequently used numbers (incidentally, I can still remember all my friends’ telephone numbers from when I was a teenager).

  If by any chance you do have cause to call me on my landline you may well imagine you hear me speaking with a slightly posher accent than I do on my mobile. Please understand it’s not an affectation on my part, it’s just how you sound through vintage bakelite. It’s also worth bearing in mind, should you decide to pick an argument, that I can’t lose, because even if you bite your mobile in half and throw it into a lake it won’t be as satisfying as crashing 380 grams of bakelite into its cradle with the same defiantly cheeky ding that Hedy Lamarr would have heard.

                                                   AA