The Hell of It All (48 page)

Anyway, back to pets, and people telling me to get one. Assuming
the stone’s being thrown by a powerful robot, I live a stone’s throw from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, a building full of lonely-looking furry creatures with gigantic pleading eyes. I could go in there and walk out with armfuls of puppies and kittens. But I won’t. Or rather can’t. I just can’t. Why?

Because animals die, that’s why. And they die too soon. They’ve got short lifespans. I had a cat once. And I loved that cat. But eventually the cat died, and I don’t know if I want to go through that again. Literally every time I stroke someone else’s cat or dog, all I can think is, ‘Yes, it’s lovely, but it’ll die’. Every time I envisage myself owning a pet, my mind immediately floods with preemptive grief. What if it got run over? Or it choked on something? What if I tripped and fell and dropped a Yellow Pages on its head? I just couldn’t bear it.

Yes, I know humans die too, and usually leave even sharper grief in their wake when they do so. But you can’t go through life without becoming at least vaguely attached to at least one or two humans in some form or another. The pain they’ll cause is unavoidable. Whereas pets seem easier to cut out.

I know, pet lovers, I know. The joy your pets give while alive far outweighs the grief of their passing. You might even argue that foreknowledge of your pet’s future death actually lends your delight in their comparatively fleeting existence even more resonance. That’s all very well. I still don’t want to come home one night to find a dead cat on the floor.

When I asked the internet whether I should get a pet, I got a variety of responses. One person suggested buying something dangerous, like a scorpion or a tiger. That way, rather than worrying about its death, I’d be worrying about my own. Our day-today existence would turn into a nail-biting contest in which only one of us would make it out alive. But I live in London. My stress levels peaked some time ago, thanks.

Someone else suggested a virtual pet, like a Tamagotchi. I had one of those years ago: accidentally put it through the washing machine in a jeans pocket and felt like a murderer. Taxidermy also got a mention. True, a stuffed pet wouldn’t die. But it would stand
around in a glass box, advertising death. And that’s what I see when I look in the mirror. I see death. The ageing process and death. And a mop. The mop’s often propped up against that wall at the back I can see from the mirror. It’s not relevant to the discussion. I just threw it in to lighten the mood.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is I’m just too damn angsty to own a pet. Which is a pity because, like I say, I’ve got a cat flap. And whenever people see it they go, ‘Ooh, have you got a cat?’ and I have to explain that I don’t, because of death and everything, and it’s a bit of a conversation-killer to be honest. And it’s happened so many times now that every time I see the cat flap, I think about the cat I don’t have, and how much I’d like one if only it wouldn’t die, and then I realise I’m mourning a theoretical cat, which in turn leads me to contemplate how little time I have in my own life, and how I shouldn’t really waste it in morbid mental cul-de-sacs, and that makes me sad. The cat flap makes me sad.

Which is why I’m going to stop typing now and brick the bastard up. Who’s laughing now, cat flap? WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?

I’m a jammy little bastard, because as time’s gone by I’ve somehow managed to convert each of my interests into a job. There’s been a chain of good fortune. As a child I idly doodled cartoons; as a teenager I drew comic strips for a kids’ comic. Since cartooning was now my job, I needed a new hobby. Luckily I had one: videogames. In my 20s I began reviewing games for a living. That put food on the table, but in my spare time, for a laugh, I built a website taking the piss out of TV shows. This led to a column in the
Guardian
Guide and so on and so forth and blah de blah. Lucky, lucky, lucky all the way.

The only trouble is that when your hobby becomes your job, it immediately ceases, by default, to be your hobby any more. And now I’ve run out of hobbies. I’m not into theatre or chess or steam trains or any of that. Films are too similar to TV shows to really offer relaxation, and there’s no way I’m taking up a sport. Spare
time is dead time. What I really need is to develop a deep interest in a subject deep enough to absorb decades of my life.

Take history. You can read thousands of books about it, or go to museums, or form little local societies where you all go on organised excursions to Sutton Hoo or whatever. I wish I was into history, but I’m not. Besides robbing me of hours of potential hobby time, this lack of historical interest leaves me feeling guilty and uninformed. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, after all. What if I accidentally kickstart the First World War all over again through sheer ignorance? That wouldn’t look good on anyone’s CV.

And interest can’t be faked. Every now and then I’ll try to force myself to suddenly find history fascinating. I’ll buy a popular history paperback peppered with glowing review quotes, open it up and stare earnestly at the words within. It’s like dangling a toy in front of an uninterested cat. My eyes may be locked on the page, but my brain simply glanced with mock curiosity for the first 10 minutes before wandering off somewhere else. And there’s nothing I can do to tempt it back.

Recently, on holiday, I visited some ancient ruins, to shuffle around alongside some other random tourists. Everyone was being quiet and reverential, because that’s what’s expected of you by the International Thought Police. It’s quite stressful and eerie. Say you find yourself staring at an old pot. Your brain, being an incredibly sophisticated computer, immediately assesses that it’s an old pot, and that old pots are boring. It’s not going to dance, or sing heartbreaking songs of yesteryear. It won’t even rock gently in the breeze. It’s just going to sit there being a pot. Probably a broken one at that. If it was on television, they’d at least have the decency to back it with some upbeat techno while zooming in and out, and even then you’d immediately switch over. But instead, because you’ve got the misfortune of actually being there in front of it, surrounded by other people, you have to stand and look at the poxy thing for a minimum of 30 seconds before moving on to gawp at the next bit of old shit, or everyone’s going to think you’re a philistine. The same principle applies in art galleries and museums.
They’re full of secretly bored people pulling falsely contemplative faces. It’s a weird mass public mime.

Obviously I’m not saying all history and culture is rubbish, or indeed that everyone’s as shallow as me. But I strongly suspect that unless you’re a hobbyist or expert – and most of the visitors won’t be – then the average museum or gallery probably contains four or five fascinating items sprinkled among a whole lot of filler. In other words, you’ll spend 10 minutes being interested for every 50 minutes of boredom. Yet if you dare shrug or yawn, everyone’ll call you a bastard. To your face. Or at least that’s how it feels.

All of which makes it difficult to envisage developing a deep interest in history or art, at least from a standing start. So they’re out as hobbies.

Perhaps ‘starting a collection’ would do the trick – although I’ve never quite understood how collectors pass the time. Technology has presumably muted the thrill of the chase somewhat; thanks to eBay, I could probably assemble a championship-level thimble collection in less than a fortnight if I put my mind to it. What do you do with a collection, apart from look at it? You can clean it, I suppose. You can build a display cabinet. You can bore other people by pointing at bits of it and saying, ‘Guess how much that one’s worth, go on’. But apart from that, what’s the point? Essentially you’re just accumulating atoms. Well, whoopie doo. How pointless.

Tell you what else I don’t get: breathing. Every day, all day. Breathing. No let-up. It’s relentless. And that’s just a load of atoms too. They go in, they come out, they go back in. Bo-ring. When you break it down, it’s as futile as collecting stamps or staring at bits of old pot.

In which case, I might as well start nurturing it as a hobby. At least it’s one I’ll definitely stick to till the day I die.

I was at Glastonbury when Jacko died. That’s not a factual statement, but a T-shirt slogan. The day after his death, souvenir tops with ‘I was at Glastonbury when Jacko died’ printed on them were
already on sale around the site. In fact, when Jacko died, I was at home playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on a Nintendo DSi. I am 38 years old.

Many festival-goers apparently discovered the news when DJs around the site began playing Michael Jackson records simultaneously. Music combined with word of mouth. That’s a nice way to find out. I learned it via a harsh electric beep, bringing my attention to a text message that simply proclaimed ‘Jackson’s dead’ in stark pixelated lettering. Clearly it’s the sort of information you have to mindlessly share with the rest of the herd the moment you hear about it. But first I needed confirmation. I occasionally text people to say there’s been a massive nuclear explosion in Canada, or David Cameron’s gone mad and launched his own breakfast cereal shaped like little swastikas or whatever, in the hope they’ll pass it on without checking. I didn’t want to fall for my own jape.

I switched on the TV. Jackson was still alive on BBC
News 24
, where they seemed to be reporting he was in hospital following a heart attack. That wasn’t good enough, so I flicked over to Sky News, which tends to blab stuff out while the Beeb drags its feet tediously checking the facts. He was bound to be dead on Sky. But he wasn’t; he was possibly in a coma. In desperation, I turned to Fox. They would already be attempting to communicate with him via the spirit realm, surely. But they weren’t. If anything, they were being more cautious than the Beeb. Boo.

Back to Sky, which was now reporting that a website was announcing his death. That’d do for now. I beamed a few texts out: ‘Michael Jackson apparently dead’. ‘Piss off’ came the reply. It was my own fault. I’d texted a few weeks earlier to say Huw Edwards had just vomited live on the news.

Confirmation of his death gradually spread across the news networks, but the main terrestrial channels were still obliviously broadcasting their scheduled programmes. ITV won the newsflash race, diving straight in after
Trial and Retribution
. Alastair Stewart abruptly shouted ‘MICHAEL JACKSON HAS DIED’ down the lens like a man standing on the shoreline trying to get the attention of someone on the deck of a passing ferry during gale-force winds.
Fair enough. Whenever I hear the phrase, ‘And now a special news report’, I automatically start scanning the room for blunt objects to club myself to death with in case they’re about to announce nuclear war. Since this wasn’t the apocalypse, but an unexpected celebrity death – sad, but not worth killing yourself with a paperweight over – Stewart was right to blurt it out as fast as he could.

After watching the news long enough to assess that, yes, he was dead, and the circumstances all seemed rather tragic, long enough for them to play a bit of ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’ and ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Blame it on the Boogie’ and so on, reminding me that he was a bona fide musical genius, I went to bed.

The next day he was still dead, but somehow deader than the day before. He was all over the radio and papers. The TV had clips of
Thriller
on heavy rotation, which seemed a tad inappropriate, what with him playing a decomposing corpse in it. If Bruce Willis died falling from a skyscraper, I doubt they’d illustrate his life story by repeatedly showing that bit from
Die Hard
where he ties a firehose round his waist and jumps off the building.

Across all the networks, a million talking heads shared their thoughts and feelings on his death. They had rung everyone in the universe and invited them on the show. On
This Morning
, a
Coronation
Street actor revealed he had once had tickets for a Michael Jackson concert but couldn’t go because of the traffic. It was a sad day indeed. At 3 p.m., his death was still ‘BREAKING NEWS’ according to Sky, which has to be some kind of record. Even 9/11 didn’t ‘break’ that long.

Next day, the news was apparently still sinking in around the globe. The BBC went live to Emily Maitlis as she stood on Hollywood Boulevard (at 1 a.m. local time) waiting for two young Latinos to perform a breakdance tribute to the King of Pop. Something went wrong with the iPod hooked up to their speakers so she had to stand there for a full two minutes, awkwardly filling in while they fiddled with the settings. Sky had flown Kay Burley out to LA too, to hear the fans’ pain and pull concerned faces. This continued into the following day. It’s probably still going on now.

But the news is not the place to ‘celebrate’ Jackson’s music. The
Glastonbury stage, the pub, the club, the office stereo, the arts documentary: that’s the place. The news should report his death, then piss off out of the way, leaving people to moonwalk and raise a toast in peace.

If I was God, here’s what I’d do now. I’d force all the rolling networks to cover nothing but the death of Michael Jackson, 24 hours a day, for the next seven years. Glue up the studio doors and keep everyone inside, endlessly ‘reporting’ it, until they start going mad and developing their own language – not just verbal, but visual. And I’d encourage viewers to place bets on which anchor would be the first to physically end it all live on air.

And while that was happening, I’d create some other stations that covered other stuff. Current affairs type stuff. I think I’d call them ‘news channels’. They might catch on.

So there I was, a few minutes ago, all set to write about the anniversary of the moon landings when I opened the paper only to discover everyone else in the world has written about the anniversary of the moon landings. Seriously. There were articles written by Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen and women. Unending spools of text composed by Capricorns, octogenarians, sailors, bison, foetuses still in the womb, individual gas molecules, you name it. Even the odd astronaut chipped in. There hasn’t been this much talk about moonwalking since Michael Jackson died.