The Hell of It All (2 page)

I tried inputting something that seemed about right. INCORRECT PIN said the screen. I slowed my breathing to clear my head. Rested my hand on the keypad a second time. Tried to fall back on
muscle memory. Performed a finger dance. INCORRECT PIN.

I became aware of the snaking, sighing queue behind me. Now I was the ditherer. A third bum guess would swallow the card, so I snapped it back into my wallet, turned on my heel and walked off, past the eyes of everyone in the queue, trying vainly to look as though not buying a ticket had been my plan all along, and everything was going smoothly, thanks for asking. Annoyed, I went outside and hailed a taxi.

As I sat in the back, I examined the contents of my head. The number had to be in there somewhere. After all, I’ve only got one card. One pin to remember. And I use it all the time, every day; in supermarkets, cafes, cashpoints, stations … everywhere. I realised that I’d better remember it soon or I wouldn’t be able to function in modern society. Yet the harder I thought, the more elusive the number became. The only thing I knew for certain was that it didn’t have a letter J in it. And that wasn’t much of a clue. My brain had deleted it for no reason whatsoever.

I asked friends for advice. One told me to close my eyes and visualise my fingers on the keypad. Trouble is, I’m so scared of thieves peeking over my shoulder, I’ve perfected the art of making my hand look like it’s entering a different pin to the one it’s actually entering. When I try to picture it in my mind’s eye, I can’t actually see what I’m doing. I’ve managed to fool myself within my own head.

Someone else told me the key was to stop worrying about it and go Zen. Next time you’re passing a cashpoint, relax: it’ll just come to you, they said. But I couldn’t relax. If you forget your pin, you have two guesses at an ATM, and two guesses in a shop. A third incorrect guess incurs a block, and isn’t worth risking. Fail on your first two tries and you have to wait till the following day, when your guess tally is reset. All of which makes each attempt pretty nerve-racking – like using an unforgiving and incredibly irritating pub trivia machine.

Over the past few days I’ve approached cashpoints with misplaced confidence, only to suffer last-minute performance anxiety. It’s like trying to go at a crowded urinal, when you’re wedged between two men with penises the size of curtain rods, pissing
away like horses. Just as a shy bladder refuses to wee, my brain refuses to dislodge the number. It won’t come out. Not a drop. I’m impotent.

This morning I gave in and called the bank, ashamed. Sensibly, they wouldn’t read my pin out over the phone, but offered to post a reminder. But because they’re a bank, and banks work to an infuriating Twilight Zone calendar in which any task that would normally take five minutes in our dimension suddenly takes five to ten ‘working days’, I’m currently operating in that unsettling limbo familiar to anyone who’s lost a wallet; you become a social outcast, carrying ID into your home branch and begging for some old-fashioned banknotes to tide you over.

Inconvenience aside, what’s creeped me out is the thudding blank hole in my head where the number used to live. It can’t be possible to completely forget something so familiar. Perhaps it was stolen. Perhaps someone hacked into my mind while I was dreaming and sucked it away through a pipe. Or perhaps this is stage one of my inevitable descent into thrashing, bewildered madness. What am I going to forget next? How to chew food?

In the meantime, if anyone’s got any hints on lost-memory retrieval, pass them on. I’ve tried everything from getting drunk to lucid dreaming, and the little bastard is still hiding in the bushes, looking on and laughing. I can sense it. But I can’t see it.

Young people today are nothing but trouble. They slouch. They’re lawless. They tote knives and flob on the ground. Look into their eyes: there’s no gratitude there. Just blank-eyed nihilism and belching. Although the belching’s coming from lower down, from the mouth bit. Young people undermine society. They come over here, into our present, downloading our ring tones. Would you want your daughter marrying one? Young people think they own the place. Well, they don’t. Yet.

But what can be done? The softly-softly approach is as much use as a Plasticine ladder or a glass trampoline. Take a group of youths
hanging out by the local bus stop, intimidating innocent pedestrians with their 21st-century patois. Now approach them. Try to point out where they’re going wrong. Be patient. Take your time. Use diagrams. Will they listen? Will they heck. They won’t even look you in the eye. While you politely set them straight, they stare at their shoes and snort, because you’re old and dull and they hate you. That’s how their minds work. They’ve got no respect for their superiors.

You can’t win with young people. But you can punish them. The older male generation loves dreaming up punishments for the young. It’s the only thing that still gets them aroused. Last week, moon-faced political letdown and professional idiot David Cameron suggested a new kind of penalty.

‘I’d like to see judges and magistrates tell a 15-year-old boy convicted of buying alcohol or causing a disturbance that the next time he appears in court he’ll have his driving licence delayed,’ he said, through his fat failing mouth, adding, ‘And then I’d like that boy to tell his friends what the judge said.’

Dribbling gump though he is, Cameron’s on to something here. And that bit where the crook-boy has to tell his mates what happened is the key.

In the mind of a young person, being told off is cool. An asbo, therefore, is like a badge of honour: a sort of alternative Victoria Cross. What’s required is a form of punishment that genuinely humiliates the offender.

Every so often a comedy judge in America will sentence someone to some kind of embarrassing public penance: walking down the street in a chicken suit, and so on. We need to go one better, by establishing a dedicated 24-hour digital TV channel on which young offenders humble and debase themselves.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say a 16-year-old called Ryan has stolen a shopping trolley and spun it round and round in the town centre while screaming abuse at horrified passers-by. He’s arrested and charged and hauled into court. The judge sentences Ryan to five hours’ community service on Channel Loser.

As part of his punishment, Ryan has to hand over his mobile
phone, so the police can search through his address book and text all his friends, telling them what time to tune in. Let’s say it’s 4 p.m. As the clock strikes four, Ryan’s friends flop down on the sofa, switch on the box, and this is what they see.

Ryan is wearing nothing but a pair of bikini bottoms. ‘Hello,’ he says, reading slowly from the autocue. ‘My name’s Ryan Daniels and I stole a trolley.’ Then the
Thomas the Tank Engine
theme music starts playing and Ryan has to dance to it. When the tune comes to an end, it instantly skips back to the beginning and Ryan has to start again. This sequence is repeated until he bursts into tears.

Then Ryan’s mum walks in, spits on a bit of tissue, and wipes his face with it. Then she produces a bag of his laundry and goes through every item in it one by one, complaining bitterly about the state of his underpants and so on.

Once she’s gone, Ryan climbs into a paddling pool filled with ice-cold water and sits down until his genitals have shrivelled to squinting point. Then he has to stand up and pull down his bikini bottoms, at which point a girl from
Hollyoaks
walks in, points and laughs in his face for 10 minutes.

Then Ryan has to push his face into a cow’s backside. The sole concession to his personal dignity is a bucket on the floor to be sick in. Finally, there’s a three-hour interactive section where the audience at home texts in phrases that Ryan has to read aloud. This, the simplest section, is also the most entertaining. Picture it.

Come the end of his punishment, Ryan will never re-offend and probably won’t even go outside again. Problem solved. What’s more, we’ve all been entertained. Everybody wins. Cameron, if you’re reading – you can have this idea for free.

Next week: solving climate change with kites.

Forget rainy April or snowblown February – early September is the very worst time of year, for one simple reason: it’s spider season. Every year, right about now, thousands of the godless eight-legged
bastards emerge from the bowels of hell (or the garden, whichever’s nearest) with the sole intention of tormenting humankind. To a committed arachnophobe like me, spider season is like a live-action version of the videogame Doom. My flat is briefly transformed into a sort of white-knuckle ghost house in which dropping your guard, even for a moment, can have terrible consequences. The other night, for instance, I awoke at 4 a.m. for a dozy late-night trip to the lavatory. As I sat there, blearily performing the necessaries, a spider the size of a small dog unexpectedly crawled out from behind the toilet and scampered across my bare right foot. I reacted like I’d been blasted in the coccyx with a taser gun. Blind panic took control of my body before the need to stop ‘going’ had registered in my brain. You can imagine the aftermath. It’s like a dirty protest in there. I may need to move house.

What’s the point of spiders anyway? They’re just mobile nightmare units put on the Earth to eat flies and frighten people by scuttling out from under the TV stand and lolloping crazily toward you. Non-arachnophobes just don’t get it. Fear of spiders isn’t a choice, but a residual evolutionary trait that some people have and some don’t, just as some people can fold their tongues and others can’t. When I see a spider, I’m across the room before I know what’s happened, like an animal running from an explosion. It’s not learned behaviour, you patronising idiots. It’s automatic code, hardwired into the brain. Some brains. My brain.

Once, when I was a student, I was preparing a meal in a hall of residence kitchen when some japester ran in carrying a huge spider he’d found outside. Having made a couple of girls scream, he decided to lunge in my direction. Without even thinking, I swiped at his belly with a kitchen knife in a desperate bid to stave him off. The blade narrowly missed him, which was a shame, because it meant I had to spend the next half-hour listening to him self-righteously bleating about how I must be crazy and he was only having a laugh. I just shrugged. Don’t startle someone with a knife in their hand unless you’re prepared to face the consequences, moron. Next time I’ll go for the eyes.

But like I say, non-arachnophobes don’t understand. Too lacking
in imagination and/or basic human empathy to comprehend the instinctive primal reaction spiders provoke in genuine sufferers, they blather idiotic platitudes like ‘It’s more scared of you than you are of it’, which is absurd since (a) spiders aren’t gripped with hypnotic dread at the sight of people, and (b) the spider’s primitive brain doesn’t have any concept of fear, in much the same way it doesn’t have any concept of what the
Police Academy
movies are.

Spiders are so resolutely horrible, they don’t even have to exist to be scary. A few weeks into a bumper spider season, I find I’m often as frightened of spiders that aren’t there as ones that are: terrified to pick up a shoe in case there’s a spider in it, for example.

This is because spiders have precisely the same modus operandi as terrorists: they target innocent civilians at random, strike unexpectedly, and cause widespread disproportionate fear. Oh, and they often die as a result of their actions, or at least they do if I’ve got a rolled-up newspaper to hand. Spiders don’t videotape their own suicide notes before embarking on their death campaigns, but that’s only because they’re too thick to operate the controls.

All of which prompts the question of why the military doesn’t get involved. Think about it: if the army fought the War on Spiders instead of the War on Terror, it would be (a) winnable, (b) cheaper, (c) popular, and (d) justifiable in the eyes of God. I’d certainly slumber more soundly in my bed if I knew Our Lads were available on 24-hour call-out; a dedicated anti-arachnid task force that would turn up at your home in the dead of night and splatter that absolute whopper that ran under the cupboard an hour ago and has left you unable to sleep ever since. Oh, and please note I’m suggesting the use of lethal force as a default. None of this fannying around with pint glasses and sheets of paper and ‘putting him outside’. He’ll just crawl in again, stupid. If a murderer climbed through your window you wouldn’t just ‘put him in the garden’. You wouldn’t rest until you saw his brains sloshed up the wall. It’s the same with spiders. If it’s not been reduced to a gritty, twitching smear, it’s not been dealt with at all.

Actually, since this is a liberal paper, I suppose arrest and detention might be acceptable. The army could take care of that: scoop
the bastards up and whisk them away to spider prison. The cells would need impossibly tiny bars, mind. Anyway, that’s what this country needs: an armed response to the arachnid menace. That this hasn’t happened is the greatest tragedy of our age.

– The above column on spiders was written at the last minute as a
replacement to the following article, which was spiked prior to
publication on for being slightly too bleak for Monday morning
Guardian readers to countenance …

Here’s a sentence rarely used to open newspaper columns: why don’t the vast majority of people just blow their own heads off? You, with the coffee cup. You, with the shoes. Why are you bothering? What’s the point? Is there a point? And has anyone written it down in an easily-digestible form? With pictures? Like a
Mr Men
book? If you think that sounds a touch depressing, you’re wrong. Pointlessness is liberating. But we’ll get onto that in a minute. First, let’s consider life: the case against.

OK. I live in London, a city where it’s hard not to look around and think, ‘Christ, so it’s come to this?’ on a daily basis. Cities are one of human civilisation’s most significant creations, and London is supposed to be one of the finest cities in the world. But it’s horrible. It’s cold, cramped, and ringing with sirens. Visually, it’s an unending collage of immense grey boxes squatting beneath immense grey clouds, surrounded by thick grey-tasting air. Your best chance of seeing a splash of colour in London is to stare at a billboard or spew on the pavement. Coincidentally, those two activities also represent the finest entertainment the city has to offer.