Pack up your troubles March 4, 2010

On weekdays at around 1 o’clock (time looks so graceful in that form; none of your functional, brutalist ‘PM’, which is surely the St James’ Centre of the temporal sphere), I become the centre of attention.   This is not due to a naked lurch through the streets of Glasgow (that happens at 2 o’clock, remember), but because of my dinner.

In this office and indeed entire building, it seems bringing your dinner in is like soooooo 1862.  Only a few hours ago, I was again batting off the question “what’s in the Tupperware today then?”  It is never asked aggressively, just incredulously, as if my 23 x 15cm plastic tub is likely to contain Hitler’s eyes or a Dodo’s cock (yes, they had them; no, don’t check it on Wikipedia, I’ve got a History degree, you know).  To them, I am a midday maniac, my opting to make pasta the night before and eschew £5.50 sushi from some arsey café an act of intrinsic, rabid insanity.  Man, you should see them when I get my orange juice out, its old Vittel sheath making it recognisably brought in.        

Yet my pack-ups, as they were called at school, are one of the sheer joys of my existence.  Meal planning the evening afore work satisfies my inner-military tosser, and when I line two or even three days’ worth of Tupperware-clad grub up in the fridge I feel like a proud father, only my offspring are better than children as you can sprinkle cheese on them, then put them in the microwave and social services don’t bat an eyelid.  Mind, that’s Broken Britain for you.

Not bringing your dinner in is the way of the madman and almost as wantonly destructive as failing to pre-book long-distance rail travel.  It is, too, ahistorical; severing the link between Mum-made cheese sandwiches served with tiny boxes of Sun-Maid raisins in a blue SuperTed lunchbox and night-before penne in Lloyd Grossman sauce (if it’s halfprice in the Co-op obviously; I’m not mental) is an act of moral vandalism.  Yes, non-bringer-inners are the dinnertime equivalents of Holocaust deniers.

 

Bag for strife February 24, 2010

There is something very beautiful about the plain blue plastic bag.  Handed out in newsagents, minimarts and family planning clinics, it is a symbol of comforting Sunday night shop runs and a subconscious protest against trendy cotton carriers that say things like ‘My other bag is achingly ethnic too’. 

A blue bag’s contents nearly always have a story.  There’s probably an Independent on Sunday in there, because by the time you got dressed that was all that remained in the shop.  There’ll likely be a Frijj milkshake or other designated hangover tonic, and very often a samosa, purchased spontaneously at the counter.  A Peperami sits nicely in a blue bag, too, as does some chewing gum you’ll later mislay.  Yes, the blue bag is a fine thing, and its stories many.  Just feel that lovely, slightly grainy texture and inhale that charred rubbery scent. 

Despite its beauty and usefulness, the bluey is well, well down the pecking order in the hierarchy of bags.  Indeed, only the lesser-spotted red and white stripe has a worse public profile.  As well as sounding like the punchline to a Bernard Manning wife joke, bags for life, with their thickset bodies and high morals, lord it over ol’ bluey.  Paper bags ooze the glamour of 80s American films and scare old ladies the most when blown up and stamped on.  Small Boots bags appear useless but are, in fact, the perfect size for lining bathroom bins (you can have that, Take a Break Readers’ Tips).  So raise a glass of Valencia wine or six Carlsbergs for a fiver to bluey, the underdog of bags.

Bus people: number one, the phone steptoe February 8, 2010

One of the joys of my controversial return to work has been the daily commute.  This involves leaving the house before dawn has shown her crack, boarding a local bus to the coach station, another to Glasgow, and then a Subway to Ibrox.  It is difficult to get comfortable on a Meatball Marinara footlong, but I’m just doing what Tebitt told me to, only in a twenty-first century fashion.

Because the days are now filled by someone else’s agenda instead of my hectic own, the commute is about the only free time I have.  For those five hours per day (yes, you read it correctly) I am at liberty to observe the world around me.  I feel like I’m on day release, only I’m not working the mornings in a charity shop but sitting in various rectangular chunks of wheeled metal.

Once you’ve counted all the Citylink motifs on the upholstery (3,476), there’s not much else to observe but the people around you; the cast in this chiefly M8-based drama.  So, pausing only to find there’s no toilet roll in the portaloo cabin again before beginning, Swimming in the Afternoons will be bringing you profiles of these characters as and when it can be arsed.  We’ll start, I think, with a glance at the Phone Steptoe.

You wouldn’t like the Phone Steptoe when he’s angry, which means you wouldn’t like him because he knows no other mood.  Twice he has boarded the 18.30 to Edinburgh, and twice he has sworn at other passengers for using mobile phones.  As his title suggests, he looks a lot like Albert Steptoe, only more dishevelled.  He smells of musty dishcloths and, short of a hankie, I once saw him blow his nose into an empty Irn Bru bottle and then place the bottle in his Tesco bag, as if for later. 

On his most recent rant, the Phone Steptoe wagged his fist at a lady in her 60s who was calling home to ask her husband to switch on the oven.  Perhaps the P.S. is a member of a hardline microwave-only sect.  He eventually moved from the back of the bus to the front, though had to sheepishly return when he realised he’d left his bumper puzzle book behind.  The other subject of his ire was a man in his twenties who was organising the purchase of some skunk.  The P.S. gesticulated like Toto Schillaci appealing for a penalty, loudly proclaimed “oh for Christ’s sake, this is all we need.  All we fucking well need” and again removed himself from earshot.  As I alighted an hour later, he was still shaking his head and muttering.  Perhaps he prefers text messages.

Swim no more December 23, 2009

Swimming in the Afternoons would like to apologise for the disgraceful break in-between posts.  If it had fans, they’d be deserting in their droves, whatever droves are.

The hiatus is explained by what can only be described as a return to the world of work.  After months away, it’s a strange planet to be back on.  Some days, I’ve even been out of bed before Mrs Afternoons.  Becoming part of society again has proved troublesome, and I’ve often missed my old friends (the toaster, the walk to the newsagent, Cash in the Attic). 

It has, though, had its up sides.  The return of the Friday Feeling is a good thing; the first week, I nearly even purchased a Crunchie, but then I remembered what a vile specimen of a chocolate bar that is.  Biting into one is like getting your gob stuck on a piss-flavoured fibreglass brick.  There is, too, a commute to work, meaning time to read, give evils to people with loud-beating headphones and have a rather attractive young woman drunkenly fall asleep on your shoulder. Further, having a sense of purpose that the aim of watching both lunchtime episodes of Seinfeld just can’t give you is pleasing. 

With two weeks off now, I’ve the warm feeling of being back among the Daytime Class, my people.  When I turned the corner onto Duke Street and saw a woman head-butting the number 49 bus and calling it a fat bastard, I knew I was back among my own.  I felt like George Bailey at the end of socialist allegory’s It’s A Wonderful Life.

And now here are some local views from the afternoon:

List of fun November 27, 2009

As Christmas approaches with all the subtlety of a taxi driver discussing immigration, most of us will be scrambling around the house for a pen and a piece of paper on which to write a shopping list.

For some, it’s the only time of year a list is written. Yet for others, the list is a weekly, or even daily, necessity. A fortnight back, I liberated this list from the basket of an old lady:

Two lavender air fresheners? Just what are you masking?

Only joking. I took it from her handbag. It is, without doubt, gloriously Scottish.  Then on Tuesday in Lidl, I found this rather more disturbing exhibit:

Lidl by Lidl

Either ‘SLEEP AID’ (clearly vital; it’s circled) is a euphemism for booze, or this is a recipe for poison. That’s fair enough, but as for the apostrophe on ‘onions’…

Class Inaction November 24, 2009

For years, politicians and commentators have been ringing the bell for the end of class.  A decade ago, Tony Blair announced that we were all middle-class now, though I had already suspected something was afoot when my Nanna upgraded from Spam to wafer-thin ham. 

Since then, the consensus has been that the old delineations of upper, middle and lower are dead.  This, though, is far from the case.  In the last few weeks, I have become aware of a class that is as likely to shop in Waitrose as it is Farmfoods.  It likes Jedward but it listens to Verdi too.  It has a place in Provence, but also a fortnight’s all-inclusive in Benidorm.  And I am part of it.

We are the Daytime Class.  We are mothers with prams who are thinking of white wine and wondering if they’ll ever go to the cinema again.  We are pocked-up heroine wallahs in every shade of sallow.  We are doughty pensioners chatting in the rain.  We are unemployed twenty-seven year-old men who put on their wives’ shoes to watch Loose Women. 

While you’re all at work or serving your sentences, we come out.  Droves of us.  You should see the streets, teeming, brimming with people who serve about as much purpose as this board I took a picture of in Cowdenbeath:

Nothing to see here. No, seriously, there's nothing to see here

We have strength in pointless, café-dwelling unity.  We know what time the post is delivered, and that Fat Sandra is having a lesbian affair ‘just because she got bored’.  We are the people that go into Poundland and use libraries.  We have favourite coffee beans and drug dealers. 

It’s high time we mobilised as a political force.  Led by somebody suitably pointless like Sue Perkins, The Daytime Class Party would advocate a complete ban of the question ‘what time did you get up today?’  The class war is on, but only once Doctors has finished.

It’s good to chalk November 20, 2009

At least once a day, I like to busy myself with a minor task I couldn’t find the time for when I was employed.  These can range from sweeping out the dust beneath the TV stand to reading through all of the supermarket offer leaflets that come with the weekly free newspaper, or hamster cage flooring as it is better known. 

One recent task was the purchase of chalk, for I am so pretentious that I’ve daubed one of my walls with blackboard paint.  It must be some kind of strange, needy schoolboy cry for help.  In days of yore, my first port of call would’ve been Woolworths.  Of course, Woolworths closed down last year, prompting at least 327 comedians and columnists to forge tales of stolen Pick and Mix.  If all of these stories were true, then Woolworths was obviously a breeding ground for theft, the South Waziristani mountain training camp of retail.  Perhaps if they’d used that as their tagline the business would’ve survived.  To break this rubbish up, here’s a picture I took of Woolworths in Ayr, which people are now using as a car park. 

Note how the woman in blue has an extra foot. If I had one of those I’d move it up and down, forming a supplementary auxiliary gob.

Walking past Woolworths, thinking ‘ha, ok, ok, people, I can now confess: I used to, like, steal Pick and Mix from Woolies when I was a kid, didn’t we all?!!!!’, I clapped my eyes upon what can only be described as Poundstretcher.  Because I’m so satirical and witty, I imagined what a great headline that would be if the MP for Ealing North was violently killed on a rack.  Brenda, 59, shop assistant, Poundstretcher, just didn’t get the joke, and neither did she purvey any chalk. 

Three or four shops later – including ‘Kool Kards Korner: We Stock Stationery’ – like a bad pool table in a pub, I remained chalk free.  This minor task was rapidly ascending into the Herculean.  Finally, and just as I was about to ask the man in a Polski Sklep where he got the chalk for his sign from (imagine the linguistic shenanigans!  It’d be like some hilarious, mildly racist Harry Enfield sketch!), my chalk hunt, or chunt, ended.  Chalkdown.  And so it was that in a small hardware shop on Leith Walk, I found myself buying four boxes (two white, two coloured, for Fridays) of PlayWrite Non-Toxics.  I’m glad they’re not toxic because they taste fucking delightful. 

 

Eat my dole November 19, 2009

After five weeks of swimming in the afternoons, last week I finally signed on. 

Leith Amusement Arcade

My first visit to the dole office in deepest Leith was every bit as fantastically depressing as I had hoped.  The room was doused in a sense of hopelessness, as if atmospheres were now available in Tesco by the jar like pot pourri or crystal meth.     

After negotiating an army of security guards who weren’t so much burly as morbidly obese, I was called over by Keith, 58.  Keith, a sort of greying, bitter version of Egg’s Dad from This Life, invited me to sit and then stared in silence at his computer for all of eight minutes, occasionally laughing to himself.  What he didn’t realise was that he’d contravened Data Protection protocol by leaving the details of his previous contestant for £65 per week lying in front of me on the desk.  Kelly Symons of 14/4 Great Junction Street is just lucky that I didn’t have a pen with me to write down her National Insurance and bank account details of DB 22 10 12C and Sort Code 18-20-24, Account Number 18524461.

Keith eventually got around to addressing me, but not before I’d noticed that the woman behind the next desk was in fact the receptionist from Gary’s office in Men Behaving Badly.  Next time, I’m going to take them a sign in an awful font that reads ‘You Don’t Have to Have Appeared on 90s Television to Work Here But it Sure Helps’.  We went through the various questions on the form, but Keith had been here thousands of times before and could no longer muster any enthusiasm, the cheap, clapped-out tartman. 

His key advice went thus: ‘Aye, it’s a bad time just now.  There’s nae work anywhere, and Edinburgh’s worse than anywhere’.  My spirits soaring, I skipped gaily out of the office.  A security man was tucking into a bacon roll.  He didn’t skip after me.

Testing times November 17, 2009

And so here it is.  Like a forlorn child waving as the circus leaves town, I am finally blogging.  It’s like so 2003.   Here is a picture of the place I’ve been spending a lot of time in.