I hate new-age everything, but there is no hate that comes close to the hate I harbour for new-age terminology: Yoga mats with intelligent performance skills, hair purifiers with hydro-cleansing agents, organically cultivated sun-kissed rain-bathed super-foods oh yeah and overpaid advertising executives with the word ‘CUNT’ embossed on their sweaty foreheads.
But anyway, after painting the town in variegated shades best mate and I decided to go out for a spot of lunch. We settled on a place which seemed nice enough though if I’m honest the distance between home and eatery was, in this case, the deciding factor. I won’t name names, no gratis advertising here, but it was the kind of place that’s in to fancy plating, dainty apportioning and incongruously sterile décor. Scanning the menu my eye snagged on a dish called: ‘Lovingly prepared soup’ and I swear, hand on heart, the ever-so-slightly-protruding vein on my temple leaped out of its place and landed in the condiments. Best mate didn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed and laughed at my hung-over antics. The couple at the neighbouring table looked at each other, aghast, and then without a word went back to their private whispers. Eventually the waiter arrived; I pointed to the menu and said: ‘I’d like to know what’s in the lovingly prepared soup please.’ He couldn’t tell me. Another waiter arrived and informed me it was your BOG-standard vegetable soup. ‘Okay’ I said, ‘I’ll try it.’ Our food arrived some minutes later. I got my giant spoon and was about to tuck it when it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know how lovingly my soup had been prepared. To satisfy my curiosity I waved the waiter over and said: ‘I’d like you to please quantify how much loving went in to the making of this particular bowl of soup.’ The manager was called. I softened my tone with a drop of facile sweetness and said: ‘Am I paying for the lovingly executed preparation or is that free?’ He laughed; in fact he was a good sport and eventually I settled down and tried the soup. It was okay but the point is they make their fucking broth no more lovingly than McDonald’s prepare their burgers and all the rest of it is a load of new-age bullocks.

‘I don’t know what amputees are complaining about, some people would give their right arm for a robot leg.’

So this afternoon, while jauntily skipping along the high street, I ran in to a former co-fornicator. We had parted amicably and seen each other since, but today I wasn’t in the mood for catching-up when he said: ‘Come for a drink.’ I forced a smile and said: ‘I can’t.’ His eyes fixed on my face in a look with which a man reconnoitres all women whom he suspects of lying and said: ‘Why not?’ Oh poppycock, I thought, why not?! And said what I usually say in these situations: ‘Because I promised my dog I’d take him to the park.’ He looked at me with a faint trace of surprise on his face and said: ‘I didn’t know you had a dog.’ I spent the next ten minutes telling him about a dog I do NOT have, which in hindsight was much more laborious than that drink would have been. Silly, silly...

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

I love tuna salad. I could eat it every day, three times a day, and not get sick of it. I hope that conveys how much I love it rather than my propensity for compulsion. But anyway...while meandering along the high street with no particular purpose or destination in mind I decided to procure the aforementioned to satisfy my discontented tum and somehow, unawares, I ended up in the allegedly, supposedly, super-organic Whole Foods Market. One tuna salad and a poncy juice of blushing-passion-fruit! variety in hand I tottered down towards the checkout. When tallied up my victuals came up to some eleven quid and ninety something-pence. I scratched my head like a bewildered Buster Keaton and exclaimed: ‘That can’t be right.’ It was. ‘Alright’ I sighed, ‘Go sing a dirge to your superiors.’ He looked at me perplexed. ‘Go get your bloody manager’ I stridently exclaimed. The manager, some years in to his thirties, surveyed me warily and said: ‘What seems to be the problem?’ I explained and further added: ‘I think I’d like you to explain what makes your ten quid tuna salad different from the rest.’ He prattled for some time about farming, sourcing and ethical produce?! until I interjected with: ‘Your produce might be ethical but your pricing sure isn’t.’ He stopped, his face a giant marachino, and exhaled: ‘Please have the salad complementary of the Whole Foods Market stores.’ I looked at him, my eyebrows squared, and said: ‘No thanks; I’d rather source my food from elsewhere.’ I left the market thinking nay convinced that even if I had two million going spare I wouldn’t waste a pip of it in that old swindlers barn. Hmm...perhaps I should write to the barn's management suggesting ‘Whole Fools Market’ as a more appropriate appellation for their super-scam-organic enterprise because you’d seriously have to be a fucking fool to shop there.

Miss Perilbottom: What's a possum like?

Mr Riskingham: Hmm...like a little furry cute thing with mickey mouse ears and a pink nose.

'Them balls there are prime quality stud balls; 100 per cent Anglo Saxon.'

I scanned the seating area outside and took a table in the shade next to the one occupied by two bedraggled bints gossiping about Big Brother. Desperate to drown-out their tittering I turned the volume on my Ipod up, took a big gulp of coffee, lit a cigarette, and immersed myself in my book. Five minutes in to my meditation, one of the women tapped on my table. I raised my eyes to find her smiling sweetly. She appraised me scrupulously with her dull blue irises and said: ‘I’m sorry but would you mind moving, the smoke is a little bit smelly.’ I replicated her smile with an equal measure of sweetness, whilst batting down an overwhelming urge to shove my headphones up her nostril, and said: ‘So is the odor of your cheap perfume but do you see me complaining?’ I watched her face congeal in shock; my lips drooped sneeringly. I took another drag on my cigarette, insouciantly flicked the ash in no particular direction, and returned to my book.

Some half an hour later three portly stiffs replaced the bints. After discussing cricket, impending holidays abroad and the socio-economic crisis, their conversation turned to ‘public intellectuals’. (Still slightly perplexed as to the meaning of this term but never mind.) Apparently some magazine has recently drawn up a list of a 100 such persons. Quite bored at this point I plunged in to my book until one of the stiffs informed the other two that he was rather thrilled to see Sir(!) Salman Rushdie make the grade. I lit another cigarette and listened to them sing Sir Salman’s praises. Ten minutes in to it I was convinced the magazine in question was designed for amiable middlebrow liberals and thus the list consisted of the like who energetically applied themselves to fashionable issues such as poverty, Islam, global warming, sectarian loathing etc. All this was good and fine, only I couldn’t understand why Rushdie – neither the most innovative nor thoughtful of writers – was deemed an intellectual. But then I couldn’t think offhand of anything more quintessentially un-intellectual than a ranking system devised by wannabe polymath hacks that'd masticated on some stuff and partially digested it. So never mind.

It seems we live in a world where smoking is equated to sucking on a crack pipe, Big Brother is deemed a major breakthrough in broadcasting and Salman Rushdie is considered an intellectual as opposed to a controversy-courting scribbler and a sugar-daddy to his young wife. Our brave new world is like that joke about the number of surrealists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being: Banana. No, I don’t find it funny either.